Sean joined St Hugh’s College as Powys Roberts Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern Languages in 2024. He teaches students in Italian at St Hugh’s College, New College, and Oriel College. He read Italian and German at Oxford, and holds a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining St Hugh’s, Sean worked as a Lecturer in Italian at Oxford between 2022 and 2024, and was based at Balliol College.
Research
Sean studies cultural heritage in contemporary Italy, blending literary and cultural studies with ethnographic methods. He is currently working on a book about Sicily’s Islamic and Jewish heritage, based on his research in Palermo. His next research project explores food traditions and religious practice in Italy. He is also interested in tourism and migration, and the anthropological study of Italy and the Mediterranean.
Sean has held a Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship; a Rome Award from the British School at Rome; an Emslie Horniman Scholarship from the Royal Anthropological Institute; and a Research Award from the American Ethnological Society. He welcomes enquiries from colleagues and students who would like to discuss shared research interests.
Publications
Peeling Back the Artichoke Leaves: Symbolism and Origin Stories in Jewish-Roman Cuisine (2024, Food, Culture & Society) (https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2023.2297484). Analysing common origin stories about dishes in the Jewish-Roman culinary tradition, showing that these provide important insights into contemporary Roman and Jewish-Roman identity.
“Palermo is a Mosaic”: Cosmopolitan Rhetoric in the Capital of Sicily (2024, Modern Italy) (https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2024.13). Using digital anthropology to ask how Palermo’s multicultural history is employed in political messaging to encourage a ‘cosmopolitan’ understanding of the city’s identity.
Gourmet and the Ghetto: The ‘Foodification’ of Rome’s Historic Jewish Quarter (2023, Gastronomica) (https://www.seanwyer.co.uk/2023). Investigating how and why Rome’s former Jewish Ghetto has become a dining destination in the twenty-first century.
(Co-author: Margaret Neil) “Sicily Can Be Very Seductive”: The White Lotus and the Transnational ‘Making’ of the Mediterranean (2023, The Italianist) https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2023.2256064). Examining how the U.S. television series, The White Lotus (2022), uses Sicily as a backdrop for touristic fantasies, using tropes from historic portrayals of Sicily by and for Anglophone audiences.
Teaching
Sean teaches various aspects of 19th to 21st-century Italian literature and culture, as well as courses exploring the development of Italian literary traditions from the medieval period to the present day. He particularly enjoys analysing the interplay between anthropological writing and literature, and texts that interrogate Sicilian and southern Italian identities. He is also interested in Dante and his contemporary reception.
