Chiara Giovanni

A writer and critic originally from the United Kingdom, Chiara Giovanni is also a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature. She received her training in literary study from the University of Oxford before moving to the Bay Area. Her current doctoral project, supported by the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship and the DARE Fellowship, is an essay collection concerning the effects of social and political upheaval on desire and intimacy. 

Chiara writes across genres, specializing in cultural criticism informed by personal experience. She likes to take up everyday objects—country music, bedrooms on Zoom, bodies on dancefloors—and hold them up to the light to reveal the contradictions within. Her work has appeared in Buzzfeed Reader, Stanford Live Magazine, and In Dance. She publishes a regular newsletter, farm life, combining popular culture, personal intimacy, virtuality, and embodiment.

A descendant of a family who has been in motion for generations, from Western India through East Africa to England and, now, the United States, Chiara writes about movement, distance, and closeness at multiple scales and resolutions.