We are delighted to cordially invite you to visit an online presentation of Prof. Laura Colombino’s Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics (2025) and output
Laura Colombino is Professor of English at the University of Genoa, Italy. Her main research areas are in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction. She has a longstanding focus on transdisciplinary studies: the relationship between writing and the visual arts; architectural spaces and their embodiment in contemporary fiction; the interplay of trauma, cultural memory and the city; the intersection between literature, ethics and the nonhuman.
She is the author of Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics (Routledge, 2025), Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body (Routledge, 2013), winner of the AIA Book Prize 2015, and Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing (Peter Lang, 2008). She has edited and coedited books on Ford (Rodopi 2009, 2013; Routledge, 2019). Most recently, she has written a chapter for A Companion to Charles Dickens, Second Edition (Wiley/Blackwell, 2026) and another for The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro (2023). She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Oxford Edition of the Works of Ford Madox Ford, and a Member of the Academy of Europe (MAE), and a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association. She has given keynote addresses and public talks in various European universities as well as art galleries (Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, the Hayward Gallery and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London).
Organizer: dr hab. dr Małgorzata Hołda, prof. UŁ, Department of British Literature and Culture, University of Lodz
Never Let Me Go with Laura Colombino and Yugin Teo - part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vILMft2DkQ
Laura about the genesis of Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics (2025): The monograph stemmed from my desire to reassess Ishiguro’s fiction from new perspectives—particularly its dialogue with thinkers such as Plato, Heidegger and Sartre, and its engagement with myths as expressions of our collective consciousness. The book explores the core ethical questions that underpin his novels, illuminating the moral lives of his characters: their sense of duty and dignity in serving others, their often-thwarted attempts to shape their own destinies, and the value they place on loyalty, affection, friendship and belonging.
Studying Ishiguro’s novels drew me into a journey of discovery through the nuances of his craft. The delight of uncovering hidden and unexpected meanings just beneath the surface of his prose proved to be the most rewarding part of my research. It is as though Ishiguro gently— almost playfully—invites his attentive readers to discern strata of signification embedded within his work. His school-age fascination with Sherlock Holmes may well have shaped this sophisticated game of clues, in which subtle textual signals—sometimes no more than slight alterations in the spelling of proper names—remain largely unnoticed. Yet, as with a trompe-l’œil in painting, once viewed from the right angle these details suddenly come into sharp focus and disclose the philosophical and mythological richness of his work.
