Florian MussgnugM.A.E.is Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies at University College London and Vice Dean International in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. He also holds a fixed-term professorial double appointment in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Rome / Università degli Studi Roma Tre. He has published widely on Twentieth and Twenty-First Century literature, theory and culture, with a focus on the environmental humanities, creative critical practice, and narratives of apocalyptic world-making, catastrophe and radical change. Recent publications include the co-edited volumes Dwelling on Grief: Narratives of Mourning across Time and Forms (Legenda, 2022); Thinking Through Relation: Encounters in Creative Critical Writing (Peter Lang, 2021); Mediating Vulnerability: Comparative Approaches and Questions of Genre (UCL Press, 2021). He is currently working on a book about neo-Malthusian speculative fiction in post-war Italy, Dystopian Intimacies: Italian Literature in the Age of Catastrophic Environmentalism, which will be published by Liverpool University Press.

Mussgnug is co-director of UCL Anthropocene, a multidisciplinary research hub which brings together specialists from the social sciences, arts and humanities, life sciences, and environmental and health sciences. In July 2021, he organised four pre-COP26 events with scholars and activists, “Sustainability as Cultural Practice: Verbal and Visual Art, History and the Environmental Humanities”, which were hosted by the BSR and the British Embassy in Italy, in collaboration with the Italian Ministry for Ecological Transition and Sapienza University Rome, and which saw the participation of ninety-four student delegates from twenty-four universities in twelve countries. He is the founding editor of two book series, New Comparative Criticism (Peter Lang) and Comparative Literature and Culture (UCL Press, with Timothy Mathews). He has held visiting and honorary positions at Sapienza University Rome, the Universities of Siena, Oxford, and Cagliari, and the BSR, and was a Research Fellow at the University of Heidelberg’s Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS). In spring 2022, he was elected to a life membership of Academia Europaea.