Silvia Riva is Full Professor of French Literature and Francophone Cultures in the Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Mediation at the University of Milan. Her research in African studies began in 1993 with her contribution to a literary history of Mali, L’Incanto del fiume, il tormento della savana, for which she focused on transcribing oral literature and analysing the work of Amadou Hampâté Bâ. She later authored the volume Nouvelle Histoire de la littérature du Congo-Kinshasa (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2006). From 2016 to 2019, she was Principal Investigator of a PRIN research unit grant, which funded two research fellows and supported the international conference Global Congo: politiques et esthétiques d’une littérature mondiale. More recently, her work has engaged with World Literature; in 2021, she coedited the first special issue on Africa for the Journal of World Literature. In September 2022, she hosted the IV Congo Research Network Congress, an interdisciplinary international network based in Antwerpen. Her publications explore Francophone African literary field through the lenses of philosophy, history, and anthropology. She is an active member of the scientific committee for the collective ZONEZADIR, which studies Francophone literary realities from an ecocritical perspective, contributing to their special issue Zones à dire. Pour une écopoétique transculturelle (2021). Her most recent interests lie in Digital Humanities, concerning the preservation of digital data related to the Francophone digital world and the analysis of cultural biases inherent in current Large Language Models.
