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Postdoctoral Fellow 2010-2012, Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM)

Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM)

Sara Villa is an ICASP Postdoctoral fellow at CREUM Universite' de Montreal with a research project focused on the influence of jazz improvisatory practices on the Beat Generation poetics. In 2008-2010 she was a research fellow in a joint program between Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies and the University of Milan, where she received her PhD in 2008. She is the translator into Italian of Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954, and the editor of a forthcoming collection of Kerouac’s jazz writings. She has published articles on Virginia Woolf, Anglo-American Cinema and Jack Kerouac, and she collaborates with the jazz magazines All About Jazz, All About Jazz Italia and Musica Jazz. Her monographic volume dedicated to the film adaptation of Woolf's Orlando (I due Orlando: Le
poetiche androgine del romanzo woolfiano e dell’adattamento cinematografico) is published by CUEM, Milan. Her main interests are focused on the poetics and politics of gender, and on the relationship between contemporary British and American literature and the other arts, particularly film and jazz music.

So one of the things that improvisation has come to mean in the context of highly technological performance is that improvisation is the last claim to the legitimate presence of a human in the performance of music.

– Bob Ostertag