The earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, causing 316,000 deaths and an unimaginable humanitarian crisis, deeply moved the world. Shortly after the disaster, Music for Relief charitable trust, recorded a compilation entitled Download to Donate for Haiti, which involved artists such as: Linkin Park with the song You are not alone, Peter Gabriel - Heroes, Enrique Iglesias - It Must Be Love, Alanise Moriseette - Still and many others.

This unimaginable catastrophe has also found its repercussions in the literature. The study of the literary representations of this natural disaster in Haitian Literature of French expression (novels, short stories, witness accounts and essays) was interest of Italian doctoral student, Alessia Vignoli of the University of Warsaw.

Alessia Vignoli received her PhD in 2020 from the Faculty of Neophilology, University of Warsaw. She received her master's degree from Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She is currently associated with the Research Laboratory on Franco-Canadian Culture and Quebec Literature at the Institute of Roman Studies, University of Warsaw, and also works as a teacher of Italian and French at the Faculty of Neophilology, University of Warsaw. She has worked as an assistant teacher of Italian in high schools in Limoges, France. She has taught French language and methodology at the Institute of Roman Studies, as well as Italian language classes at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University.

The researcher, in her project entitled The Literary Representation of the Didasters in the Prose of Haiti and the Antillean (2018-2021), which required her to make numerous research trips to Haiti and the main countries of the Haitian diaspora (France, Canada, U.S.) for deos archival research and interviews with researchers and writers.

PhD Vignoli showed that Haitian literature, while remaining sensitive to ethical issues, defies literary canons and ideological imperatives and fosters a plurality of ways of putting into words the earthquake and its effects. This exploration of the representation of natural disaster in various cultural references allowed for the recognition of Francophone Caribbean literatures, particularly the Haitian corpus, as open to multicultural and transcultural values with their heterogeneous discourses. PhD Vignoli's work contributed to the creation of a district literary canon: the literature of natural disasters.

We wish PhD Alessia Vignoli further success in research and we are proud that she is developing her scientific career at universities in Poland.