Ceresa Archipelago: A Digital Edition of Unpublished, Dispersed, and Posthumous Works. Gender, Multilingualism, Transnationality

Alice Ceresa (1923-2001) was a Swiss writer, journalist, and translator who lived and worked in Italy from the 1950s onward. Her education and professional path contributed to shaping an eclectic and original intellectual profile, characterized by transnational and multilingual dimensions. Her writing stands out for its experimental style—as exemplified by La figlia prodiga (1967)—and its focus on key issues within the feminist debates of the 1970s, such as the role of women and the education of daughters within the patriarchal family.

Although she published only a few works during her lifetime, Ceresa's legacy reflects an intense process of elaboration and revision, as well as a broad and multifaceted output, much of it unpublished, marked by an early engagement with questions of gender inequality. While she received some recognition during her lifetime, only recently has criticism begun to fully address the complexity of her work—partly due to her deliberately fragmentary and reserved writing strategy.

It is in this context that the Ceresa Archipelago: A Digital Edition of Unpublished, Dispersed, and Posthumous Works. Gender, Multilingualism, Transnationality project was born, with the aim of recovering, enhancing, and making accessible the writer's archival heritage. The corpus includes unpublished short stories, newspaper articles, essays, translations, as well as texts related to the unfinished Trilogia and the posthumous Piccolo dizionario dell’inuguaglianza femminile, which will be revisited and expanded. Through the creation of an open-access digital and multimedia edition, the project offers an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to Ceresa's work, with interactive and hypertextual content and the integration of radio broadcasts aired by RSI in the 1970s.

With the aim of opening new research perspectives, the digital edition will include thematic sections dedicated to specific scholarly fields, such as multilingualism and transnationality, as well as the links between formal experimentation, critique of gender conventions, and the deconstruction of dominant narrative models.

Ceresa Archipelago, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), involves two academic research groups—from the University of Bern (coordinated by Giovanna Cordibella) and the University of Zurich (coordinated by Tatiana Crivelli)—alongside institutional partners such as the Swiss Literary Archives (SLA) and the Data Science Lab (DSL) of the University of Bern. The project will unfold over four years, from 2025 to 2029.

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Technical Tools:
Transkribus for automatic text recognition and definition/marking of text regions in PAGE-XML
oXygen XML Editor with integration for content annotation and commenting
IIIF server and DOI/ARK resolver in collaboration with the University Library of Bern.

Teams members:
Coordinatori: Tatiana Crivelli (UZH), Giovanna Cordibella (Unibe)
Post-docs: Eleonora Norcini (UZH), Alessandro Moro (UniBe)
Phd students: Eva Vanacore (UZH), Luise Pappe (UniBe)
Assistant: Tabatha Dattrino (Unibe)
Technical support and developer: Peter Jakob Dängeli (DSL, Unibe), Levyn Andrey Bürki
Partners: Swiss Literary Archives (Bern)