ACONE LEONARDO

Leonardo Acone is a Full Professor (SSD PAED-01/B) at the Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Naples “L’Orientale.” He serves as President of the Teaching Learning Center (TLC) – Pleiadi Center of the University and teaches Children’s Literature, History of Pedagogy, and Storytelling Pedagogy across three university departments.
Previously, he was President of the Academic Council for Primary Education Sciences at the University of Salerno. Since 2006, he has taught courses in Children’s Literature, History of Schools, History of Pedagogy, Literature and Early Childhood Reading, and Storytelling Pedagogy within degree programs in Primary Education, Educational Sciences, and Community Psychology, with applications in educational, well-being, and sports contexts, at the Department of Human, Philosophical, and Educational Sciences, University of Salerno. Since 2020, he has taught History of Pedagogy in the inter-university master’s program (Unisa/Parthenope) LM 53/LM91.
His research focuses on the intersections of literature, music, the arts, and childhood—a field he began exploring in 2000 at Paris 8 University and the Sorbonne, in collaboration with Professors Genevieve Jacquinot and Gilles Boudinet.
An internationally active concert pianist for over 30 years and winner of 16 national and international piano competition awards, Acone also engages in cultural dissemination, with a particular interdisciplinary emphasis on the representation of childhood in nineteenth-century literature and music. He regularly delivers lecture-concerts and masterclasses as both a scholar and performer.
In addition to his work on literature, music, and childhood, Acone investigates the relationship between children’s literature and representations of childhood in literature, with attention to the historical and pedagogical perspectives found in Italian and international literary works.
His other research interests include the pedagogy of storytelling, particularly regarding the literary depiction of ‘challenging’ childhoods in the Global South, and the use of fairy tales as pedagogical and intercultural tools, exploring the concept of interliterature as a framework for dialogue across languages, narratives, and distant cultures.