Rate My Professor Cecilia Novero

Associate Professor Cecilia Novero, an Italian-born scholar based in New Zealand, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures within the Division of Humanities at the University of Otago. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago and taught German Language and Culture, European Studies, and Women’s Studies at various higher education institutions in the United States before her appointment at Otago. Her research centers on interdisciplinary humanities, with a focus on Visual Culture, particularly 20th- and 21st-century European cinema and the art and texts of historical and Neo-Avant-garde movements. Novero’s academic interests span Food Studies, Animal Studies, Environmental Humanities, post-humanism, literature and art from the former German Democratic Republic, travel literature, adaptation theory, gender and queer theory, and critical theory, including the works of Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor W. Adorno. She advocates for the public humanities as both a theoretical approach and practical engagement.

Novero authored Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). She edited Surrealism's Undercurrents: German Connections and Affinities (Otago German Studies, 2025) and Of Rocks, Mushrooms, and Animals: Material Ecocriticism in German-speaking Cultures (2017, with August Obermayer and Peter Barton), and co-edited journal issues on photography. Key articles include “Striking (up) interspecies collaborations with crows and falcons” (Junctures, 2023), “Posthuman Animals and the Avant-Garde: The Case of Daniel Spoerri” (2013), and “Following in the Tracks of a Dog: ‘The Beggarwoman of Locarno’ Revisited” (German Studies Review, 2015). Her projects have secured grants from Erasmus+, the Volkswagen Stiftung, and the DAAD. She serves on editorial boards of The Journal of Avant-Garde Studies, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, The Animal Studies Journal, Junctures: The Journal of Thematic Dialogues, International Journal of Gastronomy, and Otago German Studies. Novero also acts as Science Subject Librarian at Otago and co-supervises postgraduate theses on authors, artists, periods, and theoretical topics in her research areas.