Luca Costa

Following my BA in Italian Language, Literature and Culture at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano (1st, 2021), I undertook my MSt in Italian at the University of Oxford (MSt Distinction, 2022). The master thesis explored the concept of the infinite in Giacomo Leopardi and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Now, I am starting my DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford. Here, I will continue to focus on Giacomo Leopardi but will also explore how he prepared the grounds for European existentialism alongside other European writers and philosophers. Specifically, I will compare Leopardi with Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche and Miguel de Unamuno attempting to prove how these authors reflect upon the concept of existence in similar terms. The file rouge of my research is the concept of the irrational, to be thought of as the great new philosophical solution to the problem of existence, proposed by Leopardi first, and the other authors after him. This project is generously supported by the AHRC and the Clarendon fund and supervised by Professor Nicola Gardini.  
Beyond academia, my interests include playing and listening to classical music and working up my body and mind with callisthenics (i.e., bodyweight strength development).