Malina Stefanovska is one of the generous souls who ushered me into the study of Casanova’s life. In 2016, she organized a Casanova symposium at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught. Meeting so many other Casanovists there and hearing their new ideas inspired me to continue my own scholarship. I then reached out to Malina to help me organize the 2019 Casanova in Place symposium. Here you’ll see her biography with its extensive list of publications and the abstract that she offered for this June’s Casanova in Time symposium.

In this photo, Malina Stefanovska is in the front, wearing white.

Abstract: For this International conference organized in memory of the 300dth anniversary of the birth of Giacomo Casanova, the famed autobiographer and author of the Eighteenth century, I will elucidate a facet hitherto not theorized of his philosophical perspective : his relationship to reality. My reading is inspired by French philosopher Clément Rosset[1] whose readings of philosophers, from the Greeks to Nietzsche, brings to light the irrational “joie de vivre,” a major force and a philosophical concept developed in response to the daunting nature of reality. I analyze Casanova’s joyfulness as represented in an amorous encounter with a woman of letters of his time, Giustiniana Wynn, narrated in an erotic and comical mode.

[1] Clément Rosset, La Force Majeure (Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1983); Le Réel. Traité de l’Idiotie (Paris, Editiions Gallimard, 1977)

Biography: Malina Stefanovska, Professor Emerita in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, at UCLA, specializes in 17th and 18th century French Literature, in particular the genres of memoirs, autobiographies and theater. Her authored or edited books are :

Saint-Simon, un historien dans les marges (Paris, Honoré Champion, 1998).

La Politique du cardinal de Retz : passions et factions (Paris, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008).

Space and Self in Early Modern European Cultures, (University of Toronto Press, Canada, 2012). (co-edited with D. Sabean)

Littérature et politique. Factions et dissidences de la Ligue à la Fronde, (Paris, Garnier, 2015). Co-edited with A. Paschoud.

From the Margins to the Center: Casanova in the Enlightenment (Un. Of Toronto Press, 2021). Editor.

Récits de vie et pratiques de sociabilité. 1680-1850 (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2020). Co-edited with M.-P. De Weerdt Pilorge.

Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual. 1600-1850. Between East and West (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2021). Co-edited.

       She has also published over fifty book chapters, articles and encyclopedia entries on her area of specialization.

       After studying other people’s memoirs, she decided to write her own, and has recently published a literary memoir/family history in French, translated in English:

Sevdah. Élégie pour un Sud rêvé  (Presses Universitaires du nouveau monde, 2021)

Sevdah. Elegy for a South Imagined (University Press of the South, 2023). 

      She is presently working on an imaginary correspondence with Giacomo Casanova and on a second personal memoir.

On the right, Malina stands with Jean-Christophe Igalens in the Longhena Library on San Giorgio Maggiore.