Daniele Monticelli
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Order of the Star of Italy (2024)
Daniele Monticelli | |
|---|---|
 Monticelli in 2022 | |
| Born | 14 May 1970 Milan, Italy |
| Occupations | Semiotician, translator, academic |
| Awards | Order of the White Star, 4th Class (2018) Order of the Star of Italy (2024) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Milan University of Tartu |
| Thesis | 'Wholeness and its remainders: theoretical procedures of totalization and detotalization in semiotics, philosophy and politics' (2008) |
| Doctoral advisor | Mihhail Lotman |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Semiotics, translation studies |
| Institutions | Tallinn University |
Daniele Monticelli (born 14 May 1970) is an Italian-born semiotician, translation scholar and translator associated with Tallinn University in Estonia.[1][2] His research has centred on cultural semiotics, translation theory and history, the ideological uses of translation, and contemporary critical theory.[1][3][4][5] He has also translated Estonian literature into Italian, including works by Lennart Meri, Doris Kareva and other Estonian authors.[6][7][8] He is a recipient of the Order of the White Star, 4th Class, and the Order of the Star of Italy.[9][10]
Monticelli received an MA in philosophy from the University of Milan in 1995.[1][6] He later earned a PhD in semiotics at the University of Tartu in 2008.[1][11] His dissertation, supervised by Mihhail Lotman, was titled Wholeness and its remainders: theoretical procedures of totalization and detotalization in semiotics, philosophy and politics.[11][12] In 2013–14 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Yale University's Department of Comparative Literature.[1][2]
Monticelli has taught and carried out research in Estonia for many years and is professor at Tallinn University.[1][2] He coordinates the Estonian Research Council project Translation in History, Estonia 1850–2010: Texts, Agents, Institutions and Practices.[13][14]
Research
Monticelli's published work combines semiotics, comparative literature, translation studies and political theory. In his scholarly articles he has written on translation under totalitarian rule in Soviet Estonia, on the relation between ideology and culture in the work of Roland Barthes and Juri Lotman, and on the concepts of borders and translation in Lotman's theory of the semiosphere.[3][4][5] His wider research interests, as described by Tallinn University and the Estonian Research Information System, include philosophy of language, literary semiotics, Italian studies and contemporary critical theory, with particular attention to thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek.[1][2]
In addition to his articles, Monticelli has co-edited important works in translation history, including Translation Under Communism (2022) and The Routledge Handbook of the History of Translation Studies (2024).[15][14]
Translation work
Alongside his academic work, Monticelli has translated Estonian fiction, poetry, drama and essays into Italian.[1][6] Writers whose works he has translated include Andrus Kivirähk, Tõnu Õnnepalu, Viivi Luik, Karl Martin Sinijärv, Iivi-Ann Masso, Jaan Tätte, Urmas Lennuk, Maarja Kangro, Andres Ehin, Ülar Ploom, Hasso Krull and Doris Kareva.[6]
In 2016 Gangemi Editore published his Italian translation of Lennart Meri's Hõbevalge under the title Bianco Argento.[7] The translation received Tallinn University's literature award for best translation in 2017.[16] In 2024 Bompiani published In sogno ho visto il mondo, a bilingual Italian selection of poetry by Doris Kareva translated and compiled by Monticelli.[8][17] For that book he received the Estonian Cultural Endowment's 2025 annual award for translation from Estonian into a foreign language.[17]
