Martina Basciani holds a master’s degree in postcolonial literatures from the University of Bologna and a second master’s degree in migration studies from Malmö University. She has conducted research in several universities in Europe and worldwide, also including the University of Kent and the University of Toronto. She is part of the organizing committee for the 36th EAAS (European Association for American Studies) Conference.

Her Ph.D. project investigates the Literature of Resurgence, a body of texts produced by Native American and Indigenous writers on Turtle Island (United States and Canada). With a transnational glimpse, she frames Resurgent Literature as a specific genre or tradition, one that transcends imposed borders and nation-states to instead focus on the present and future of Indigeneity. In this light, her analytical corpus comprises the post-2015 novels and short stories by Louise Erdrich (Chippewa Nishnaabeg from the Turtle Mountain Band, North Dakota) and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg from Alderville First Nation, Ontario). Through this investigation, she questions the ethical implications of conducting Indigenous studies in Europe from a non-Indigenous perspective, problematizing a long-standing question, and offering to test World Literature as a potentially decolonial lens. Proposing to employ World Literature not as a predetermined model or structure, but rather as “a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time” (Damrosch 2003, 281), she questions how Europeans can read and teach Indigenous (Anishinaabe) Resurgent Literature without replicating the painful legacies of colonial extractivism and commodification.

Her doctoral project has been funded by Elsa-Neumann-Scholarship since October 2024.