News and Events
Word and Image, East and West
Symposium | 28-29 October 2011
Go to the symposium website for further information on registration, the program and accommodation. | Link to the Symposium poster.
(Image from the original in the Rare Books & Special Collections, University of Sydney Library)
The purpose of the symposium is to bring together scholars and researchers from different background (historical, literary, theoretical or philosophical) in order to discuss and compare the mutual interdependence of words and images, the mixed mediality of the visual and the verbal and the way that have been interlacing in different geographical and cultural areas, from Europe and the US to the Middle East and the Asia Pacific region, throughout the years.
Contributions will cover:
- literature and painting
- iconography and narrative
- visual poetry
- writing and photography
- mixed-media forms and intermedia texts
- graffiti
Discussions are therefore encouraged on the different modalities one medium has been included in the other in the Western and Eastern cultures, as well as the way the interaction of word and image has contributed to challenge the East/West binary. Contributions are invited to discuss issues of:
- transcription
- juxtaposition
- transposition and translation
- interference
- ekphrasis
Selected contributions will be included in a 2012 Special Issue of the international refereed journal Literature & Aesthetics (University of Sydney Society of Literature & Aesthetics), as well as in a Special Issue of PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies
Enquiries and proposals should be addressed to:
Research Seminar Series | Semester 2, 2011
August 4 2011 | Mario Casari
Ferdowsi’s Italian journey: the reception of the Persian Epic ”Shahname” in Italy
Mario Casari, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’
Venue: Latin 2 S225 in Quad
Time: 4.15 pm, Thursday August 4 2011
Ferdowsi’s Shahname, ‘Book of the Kings’, is unanimously considered the most important Persian Epic. Composed astride the 10th and 11th centuries, this literary and legendary account of human history draws on a vast web of ancient sources, some of which reach back to Greek and Latin texts.
On the other hand, the book’s reception in Europe in the centuries following its composition has progressed slowly and in a fragmentary way, also on account of its substantial length and ambitious scope. Despite this, since the end of the 16th century, when Persian was hardly known as a language in Europe, Italy has played a distinctive role in introducing this work’s author, as well as its key themes into Europe’s most attentive intellectual circles. This paper explores some aspects of this story of cultural translation, from the early Renaissance to more recent studies of the 20th century.
Mario Casari teaches Persian language and literature at the Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’ and Arabic language and literature at the Università del Salento, in Lecce, Italy. His research deals mainly with the circulation of texts and cultural relations between Europe and the Islamic world from medieval times to the modern age. In particular he has published a number of studies concerning the travel of the Alexander Romance throughout the Arabic and Persian traditions. I Tatti Fellow in 2008/09, he is now working on the birth of modern Arabic and Persian Studies in Renaissance Italy.
August 18 2011 | Angelo Mazzocco
Dante, Leonardo Bruni, and the Issue of Fiorentinità
Angelo Mazzocco, Mount Holyoke College
Venue: Latin 2 S225 in Quad
Time: 4.15 pm, Thursday August 18 2011
Leonardo Bruni’s (circa 1374-1444) definition of Fiorentinità differed significantly from that of the medieval Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Nonetheless in the last ten ears of his career, the illustrious humanist who was one of the founders of the Florentine humanistic movement, sang the praises of Florence’s divine poet. Bruni came to see Dante and his literary production as a fundamental component of the Florentine heritage. This presentation will address Dante’s and Bruni’s assessment of the spirit, culture, politics and society of the Florence of their time, getting to the heart of the issue of Fiorentinità.
Angelo Mazzocco is Professor Emeritus of Italian and Spanish at Mount Holyoke College specializing in Medieval and Renaissance culture with emphasis on Dante, antiquarianism, historical linguistics, and Renaissance humanism. He has authored two books and numerous articles including, most recently, “Urbem Romam florentem ac qualem beatus Aurelius Augustinus triumphantem videre desideravit: A Thorny Issue in Biondo Flavio’s Roma triumphans,” Studi umanistici piceni (Sassoferrato, 2010); “Biondo e Leto: Protagonisti dell’antiquaria quattrocentesca” in Pomponio Leto: tra identità e cultura internazionale (Rome, 2010), and “Riflessioni storiche per Roma in età rinascimentale: Il contributo del mondo anglofono,” in Roma nel Rinascimento (Rome, 2008). The recipient of many grants and fellowships throughout his career, he was most recently named a Mellon Emeritus Fellow by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for his current book-in-progress, Biondo Flavio and Renaissance Thought.
August 23 2011 | Alfredo Luzi
Eroe e popolo nel Risorgimento italiano: il caso Garibaldi
Alfredo Luzi, Università di Macerata
Venue: New Law Seminar 105, New Law School Building, Eastern Avenue
Time: 4.15 pm, Thursday August 23 2011
Aldredo Luzio is Professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature at the University of Macerata and has published widely on topics as varied as Italian poet Mario Luzi, the literature of migration, Italian Australian writer Gino Nibbi and Carmine Abate, a Calabrian writer of Albanian descent. He has been visiting professor at Universities in France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Argentina, Canada and Australia.
September 15 2011 | Theodore Ell
Piero Bigongiari’s ‘dovere dell’inquietudine’ and the need for poetry in an unfriendly century.
Theodore Ell, The University of Sydney
Venue: TBA
Time: 4.15 pm, Thursday September 15 2011
Piero Bigongiari (1914-1997), one of the so-called terza generazione of ermetici, took eight years to write his collection of poems about the Second World War, Rogo (1944-1952). The story of its tortured has been told through several seminars over the past few years, and this talk will begin by examining the final stage in Bigongiari’s long and difficult project, when he resolved Rogo’s restless anxieties in an atmosphere of relief and reconciliation to suffering.
This conclusion is of great importance in considering a serious problem that has overshadowed Rogo ever since its publication, and that also affects the poetry of Bigongiari’s contemporaries: the question of relevance. When at last Bigongiari completed the work, the year was 1952, and the Italian literary scene was changing in ways that did not favour Rogo’s sensibility. Political engagement, especially from a socialist position, was practically required of writers in all genres, but Rogo does not declare a political position; indeed, in its fixation on the emotional experience of the individual, it shuns political generalisations. Rogo also seemed late: Bigongiari’s contemporaries Mario Luzi and Alessandro Parronchi had already produced their responses to the war before 1950. While Rogo was received enthusiastically by many leading poets and critics, it was also open to dissent from the newly politicised elements in Italian literature. Such dissent materialised in 1953, when in his provocative Discorso sulla poesia Salvatore Quasimodo labelled Bigongiari’s idiom as politically useless, licensing other critics to disparage even its human motives. The result was that Bigongiari and his contemporaries lost the attention of a wide readership, and Rogo was largely forgotten.
To consider Rogo as merely the last trace of an outmoded kind of poetry does not do it justice, and at a distance of sixty years, with the archives of all of the terza generazione open for research, it is now possible to re-assess the collection’s historical position. Its long genesis, its late appearance and its emphasis on suffering do not diminish its relevance, but reinforce it. Rogo expresses what Bigongiari called, in an article from the early stages of its composition that has only been rediscovered recently, ‘il dovere dell’inquietudine’ – the moral imperative of questioning one’s own emotional honesty and of exercising concern for the philosophical direction of one’s own times, continually and uncompromisingly.
Theodore Ell obtained his PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Sydney in 2010, with a thesis on the poetry collection ROGO (1944-1952) by the Florentine Piero Bigongiari (1914-1997). His research on contemporary Italian poetry continues, with an emphasis on its endurance as a craft during the Second World War, and the effects of political missions embarked on by certain poets after the 1940s.
XI World Italian Language Week
Buon Compleanno Italia!
This year World Italian Language Week (Settimana della Lingua Italiana nel Mondo), designated by the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs to promote the Italian Language throughout the world, celebrates the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. The Department of Italian Studies of the University of Sydney has organized a series of events to which students, colleagues and the community are invited.
Friday, 19 August 2011 - Videoconference on the Italian Language
Video Conference Room 323, Door 318, Brennan MacCallum Building
11:00am - 1:30pm
Doctor Antonia Rubino will take part in a videoconference on the theme “Why Italian?” organised by the Australian National University in conjunction with the Embassy of Italy in Canberra and other Australian universities and schools where Italian is taught. She will talk about the Italian language in New South Wales.
Tuesday, 23 August 2011 - Prize Giving Ceremony
New Law Seminar Room 105, New Law School Building
4:00pm
Student Paul Karp, one of the winners of the 10th edition of the literary competition for students of Italian abroad organized by the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, will be awarded the prize by Doctor Angelo Gioè, Cultural Attaché at the Italian Institute of Culture in Sydney.
Tuesday 23 August 2011 - Talk on the Risorgimento
New Law Seminar Room 105, New Law School Building
4:30pm
Professor Alfredo Luzi (Università di Macerata) will talk in Italian on “Eroe e popolo nel Risorgimento italiano: il caso Garibaldi”.
Wednesday 24 August 2011 - Film: I vicerè
Casa d’Italia, 67 Norton Street, Leichhardt
6:00pm
In collaboration with Co.As.It. A screening of the film I vicerè by Roberto Faenza (2007) (in Italian), a cinematic adaptation of the novel by Federico De Roberto.
Thursday 25 August 2011 - Talk on the Risorgimento
New Law Seminar Room 107, New Law School Building
6:00pm
Professor Paul Pickering (Centre for European Studies, Australian National University) will talk on “Garibaldi's Shirt: The influence of Garibaldi and Mazzini on popular politics after 1850”.
Past Events
Research Seminar Series | Stage, Performance and Masks | Semester 1, 2011
10 March 2011 | Hilary Gatti
Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio and Possible English Echoes
Hilary Gatti, University of Rome La Sapienza
Venue: SLC Common Room, Fifth Floor, Brennan MacCallum A18
Time: 4.15 pm, Thursday 10 March 2011
The seminar will open with some biographical data on the relationship between Giordano Bruno and the city of Naples. It will be then be devoted to a discussion of Bruno’s first published text to have survived, and only drama, Candelaio, printed in Paris in 1582. The discussion will be centred on the way in which Bruno, in depicting his memories of Naples on the stage, picks up and develops in extremely idiosyncratic terms the formal structure of Italian renaissance comedy, forcing its already well established formal patterns to deliberately paradoxical extremes - at the level of dramatic language and character, as well as plot. This intense questioning of an established dramatic genre, as well as of the society and patterns of behaviour from which it derived, has led a number of commentators to find echoes of Bruno’s comedy in some Elizabethan and Jacobean comedies, in particular Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. Although there is no documentary evidence of any knowledge of Bruno’s play by either Shakespeare or Ben Jonson - which means that such echoes have to be considered hypothetical - it will be claimed that the occasional references to Bruno in critical discussion of Shakespeare and Jonson are well founded, and deserving of further attention.
Prof Hilary Gatti has taught English Literature for many years in the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. She has published extensively on Giordano Bruno, with particular attention to his relationship with English culture: a subject that forms a section of her recent volume of Essays on Giordano Bruno, Princeton University Press, 2011.
5 May 2011 | Nerida Newbigin
Two moments of cultural interchange in fifteenth-century Florence
Nerida Newbigin, University of Sydney
Venue: SLC Common Room, Fifth Floor, Brennan MacCallum A18
Time: 4.15 pm, Thursday 10 March 2011
In 2010 I was able to return to my research on fifteenth-century Florentine sacre rappresentazioni with some remarkable and unexpected results.
The first resulted from a chance encounter with Charles Dempsey, who asked me to read a lecture that he was preparing for publication. I disagreed strongly with what he had said, but that disagreement pushed me (I hope us – though I have not yet seen the published version) into a new understanding of how the Sibyls got to Florence, and into plays and processions, in 1454.
The second resulted from an ongoing dissatisfaction with the dating of the two volumes of sacre rappresentazioni published by the Florentine printer Antonio Miscomini to 1490 and 1490|1495. I asked two experts, Neil Harris (Udine) and Piero Scapecchi (BNCF), what the basis of this dating was, and they concluded that there was none, but offered every assistance that helped me to establish a more reliable date of c. 1485 using evidence from watermarks.
The date matters: the first play of one of the two volumes is Antonia Pulci’s Domitilla, and bears the date of 1483. It may be that Antonia was not only the first European woman to see her works through the printing press, but also the first author of sacre rappresentazioni to do so.
In my presentation, I will discuss both the processes and the outcomes of my research.
Prof Nerida Newbigin is Emeritus Professor of Italian at the University of Sydney. Her research interests are philological and historical: the history of theatre and performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, late medieval lay piety, and the editing and interpretation of theatrical texts and archival material.
19 May 2011 | Joseph Farrell
Who Really Wrote Carlo Goldoni's ‘Servant of Two Masters’?
Joseph Farrell, University of Strathclyde
Venue: Main Quadrangle, Room: Latin S225
Time: 4.15 pm, Thursday 19 March 2011
Carlo Goldoni's "Servant of Two Masters" has drawn the admiration of writers from Goethe onwards, and in modern times has been produced by many of Europe's finest directors from Meyerhold to Giorgio Strehler. However, its composition was a result of certain chance circumstances. Goldoni had fled from Venice, was living in Pisa, had given up all contact with theatre and was working profitably as a lawyer when the famous Harlequin, Antonio Sacchi, contacted him to request a new script. Sacchi even recommended a French play as model, although in fact it became more than a model. In addition, although the theatrical reforms with which Goldoni's name is associated were not complete, they were well under way. The script represents something of a return to commedia dell'arte and when it was later published, Goldoni underlined the distance he had travelled in his playwriting. So what is the nature of this work, and the extent of Goldoni's contribution to its creation?
Prof Farrell is Professor Emeritus in Italian, at the University of Strathclyde (Scotland). He has published extensively on Sicilian culture and Italian Theatre. He has also done work on Italian politics and on translation theory and practice. His numerous publications include authored books on Leonardo Sciascia (Edinburgh University Press, 1995), Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Harlequins of the Revolution (London, Methuen, 2001) and Sicily (London, Signal Books, forthcoming).
24 May 2011 | Joseph Farrell
The Emergence of Professional Theatre in England and Italy.
Joseph Farrell, University of Strathclyde
Venue: SLC Common Room, Fifth Floor, Brennan MacCallum A18
Time: 4.15 pm, Thursday 24 March 2011
Italian theatre occupies an anomalous situation in the context of western theatre. While its importance for the formation and development of national theatre traditions all over Europe cannot be underestimated, it itself has contributed relatively few playwrights to the standard European stage. Perhaps the Italian tradition is different in nature from others, in the sense that whereas French, Spanish, English theatres have always been author-centred, Italian theatre is essentially actor-centred. Professional theatre in England and Italy emerged at approximately the same time, but took different directions from the start.
2 April 2011 | Sebastiana Nervegna
Reconstructing the Repertoire of Ancient Greek Actors in the Fourth Century BC
Sebastiana Nervegna, University of Sydney
Venue: SLC Common Room, Fifth Floor, Brennan MacCallum A18
Time: 4.15 pm, Thursday 2 April 2011
This paper gathers and discusses a variety of sources to identify the classical tragedies re-performed in the fourth century BC, in and out of Athens. The evidence is disparate, wide-ranging and sometimes difficult to assess: it includes literary sources, the epigraphic record, the iconographic material and our scanty information on the Greek models of Roman Republican tragedies. My main interests are: (i) to determine the role of theatrical performances in consolidating the tragic canon made up by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, (ii) to identify the reasons behind the actors’ selection of specific tragedies, and (iii) to assess the relationship between theatrical activities and scholarly works on Greek drama.
Sebastiana Nervegna is an Australian Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Classics and Ancient History of the University of Sydney. She has written several contributions on the ancient reception of Greek drama and she is the author of Menander in Antiquity: the Contexts of Reception, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Research Seminar Series | Semester 2, 2010
5 August 2010 | María Antonia Yélamos
Giorgio Manganelli e la scrittura dell'ombra
María Antonia Yélamos, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Prof Yélamos will present a seminar based on her recently published book Giorgio Manganelli y la escritura de la sombra (Punto F Ediciones, 2010). This seminar will be presented in Italian.
Nella letteratura di Giorgio Manganelli, sia la lettura che la scrittura del silenzio escludono in modo radicale il mondo della realtà (il mondo delle apparenze, il mondo della luce) dal mondo della letteratura (che, invece, appartiene al mondo della notte, del buio, del non-manifestato). Per Manganelli il mondo della letteratura è un mondo discontinuo, che si trova “oltre lo specchio”; un mondo in cui le parole acquistano forme effimere che subito si dissolvono nel Nulla. Per Manganelli, la parola letteraria è allo stesso tempo “stemma” e “ombra”, presenza e assenza; essa fonda il regno dello “stemma” (l’opera letteraria) e allo stesso tempo aspira al limite del vuoto, del “Nulla”, dell’ombra” (l’immagine dietro allo specchio). La letteratura è, dunque, un processo di distruzione-creazione. Questa “scrittura dell’ombra” si manifesta nel Manganelli lettore, scrittore e critico di Hilarotragoedia, Nuovo commento, Pinocchio: un libro parallelo e Discorso dell’ombra e dello stemma.
María Antonia Yélamos is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Linguistics at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. During August 2010 she will be visiting the University of Sydney within the framework of the MARCO exchange program of the Universidad Autónoma.
12 August 2010 | Alan O'Leary
Italian National Cinema/Home and Away
Alan O'Leary, University of Leeds (UK)
This paper looks what has been considered worthy of remembering, studying and exporting from the cinema of Italy: what has been recognised or constructed as Italian ‘national’ cinema, in other words. In recent years, film scholarship has become suspicious (for industrial and cultural reasons) of the idea of nationality in film and of the writing of national histories of the cinema. Still, the assertion of such ‘nationality’ is imperative for producers and academics. But what are the assumptions about what makes Italian cinema ‘national’ that exclude many of the films and genres watched by Italians themselves from the standard history of Italy’s 100 years of cinema? I discuss three films in particular: Paisà (Roberto Rossellini, 1946), La vita è bella (Roberto Benigni, 1997), and Natale in India (Neri Parenti, 2003). These are three very different films which nonetheless have significant features in common, especially the staging of the encounter with the foreigner. Two of the films are an interpolation of the foreigner as spectator; the last uses the foreigner and foreign location as part of a photogenic exotic travelogue (it never expects the foreigner to see the film). Paisà and La vita è bella are directed towards the wider world as Italy’s international self-representation: this is cinema as a diplomatic project. Natale in India is intended only for an Italian audience as part of an annual national holiday ritual. Which of these films represent the true national cinema? My answer is that it has to be both.
Alan O’Leary is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Leeds (UK). He is the author of various articles, essays and edited volumes on the representation of terrorism in Italian cinema. He is also the author of Tragedia all'italiana: Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms, 1970-2008 (2009). Dr O’Leary is now working on a series of case studies of commercial films and cinema genres in Italy. During August 2010 he will be a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Italian Studies as a recipient of a Fellowship grant from the World Universities Network of the University of Leeds.
17 August 2010 | Alan O'Leary
Studying the cinepanettone
Alan O'Leary, University of Leeds (UK)
The Italian film industry has often been pronounced moribund but has always survived by providing critically despised films, usually comedies, for a popular audience. In recent years it has produced a series of films released annually around Christmas colloquially referred to as ‘cinepanettoni’. These films have been successful enough to have become part of the annual festive rituals for a large proportion of the population, and have spawned offshoots as popular actors are employed to produce copycat films; indeed, the industry is now attempting to generate an equivalent series of films for the summer season.
Despite the undeniable success of these films, and the cult status of many which has generated a complex network of fan cultures, they remain largely unstudied, and have suffered a critical disdain from those representing authoritative film criticism and scholarship. In short, they are at once despised and ignored by ‘official’ culture, or indeed seen as symptomatic or even partly causal of a putative (and Pasolinian) ‘cambiamento antropologico’ that has led to the election of successive right-wing governments.
This paper will ask what approaches would best be used to describe and analyse these films.
26 August 2010 | Matteo Santipolo
Congiuntivo e condizionale nell’italiano contemporaneo: fotografia di un cambiamento di atteggiamento in atto.
Matteo Santipolo, University of Padua
Lungi dall’essere patologico, il cambiamento linguistico è un fenomeno totalmente fisiologico di qualsiasi lingua viva, a tal punto da poter essere preso proprio come suo indice di vitalità. Come è noto alla base del cambiamento, spesso si trova la variazione sociolinguistica, deviante dai modelli “ufficiali”, il cui consolidamento passa necessariamente attraverso il grado di accettabilità di una struttura più o meno innovativa che i parlanti le attribuiscono. Spesso accade che i giudizi a proposito di tali deviazioni si spacchino: da un lato vi è chi li approva e dall’altro chi non solo li respinge ma li valuta come segnale di una degenerazione in corso.
Il presente seminario illustrerà i risultati di una ricerca condotta recentemente su un campione di studenti delle Facoltà di Lingue e di Scienze della Formazione delle Università di Padova (sede di Rovigo), Venezia e Bari, il cui obiettivo era fornire un quadro indicativo della percezione che i giovani di livello culturale medio-alto hanno del grado di grammaticalità e dell’uso dell’indicativo in sostituzione del congiuntivo o del condizionale in contesti rappresentati dalle seguenti frasi:
- Se ti sbrigavi, non perdevi il treno
- Mi ha detto che arrivava più tardi
- Penso che oggi non piove
Ciò che è emerso è che si sta verificando un deciso cambiamento nell’atteggiamento verso queste strutture che potrebbe essere il sintomo di un cambiamento strutturale.
I dati raccolti verranno analizzati principalmente da due prospettive:
- sociolinguistica, valutando cioè quali ipotesi si possano avanzare per il fenomeno oggetto di studio;
- glottodidattica, suggerendo come la variazione e il cambiamento possano e debbano rientrare nell’ambito della didattica dell’italiano come L2/LS.
Matteo Santipolo is “Professore Associato” at the University of Padua in Italy. He has widely published on intercultural communication, sociolinguistics and applied methodology. He is the author of Dalla sociolinguistica alla glottodidattica (Torino: UTET, 2002) and Le varietà dell’inglese contemporaneo (Roma: Carocci, 2006). He has also edited L’italiano nel mondo. Mete e metodi dell’insegnamento dell’italiano nel mondo. Un’indagine qualitativa (Roma: Bonacci, 2003), La comunicazione interculturale in ambito sociosanitario (Venezia: Cafoscarina, 2004) and L’italiano. Contesti di insegnamento in Italia e all’estero (Torino: UTET 2006).
23 September 2010 | Maria Cristina Mauceri | Book Launch
Nuovo Immaginario Italiano. Stranieri a confronto nella letteratura italiana contemporanea
M. Cristina Mauceri and M. Grazia Negro
How do Italian writers represent foreigners who have recently arrived in Italy? How do foreigners perceive themselves and Italians and their interactions? In this study, a comparative analysis of the representation of three types of foreigners is carried out, using a counterpoint method for the first time in Italian literature. Texts by Italian and migrant writers are contrasted in order to create an intercultural dialogue. The image of Italy that comes out of this study shows that this nation, which has screened out memories of its own past of emigration, is slowly changing and opening up to alterity.
Maria Cristina Mauceri is Cassamarca Lecturer at the University of Sydney.
14 October 2010 | Susanna Scarparo
Contemporary Italian Women Filmmakers: Reframing the Past, the Present and Cinematic Tradition.
Susanna Scarparo, Monash University
The recent proliferation of works by Italian women film makers has been truly remarkable. In my paper I discuss why comparatively little attention has been paid to these works, and analyse them by drawing on the concept of ‘reframing’: I consider how women filmmakers have reframed cinematic tradition by appropriating and rethinking ways of imagining Italy through both realistic cinema and less conventional cinematic modes and by challenging traditional representations of women through female centred narratives; I examine how women have reframed female history by rendering the history and stories of women visible in the cinematic space and how they have renegotiated the mother/daughter relationship; and I discuss how these filmmakers are addressing pressing social issues through films that reframe Italy by engaging with changing national and transnational contexts from a position of gendered marginality.
Susanna Scarparo is Cassamarca Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at Monash University. She is the author of Elusive Subjects: Biography as Gendered Metafiction (2005) and has co-edited Across Genres, Generations and Borders: Italian Women Writing Lives (2005), Violent Depictions: Representing Violence Across Cultures (2006) and Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Italian Culture: Representations and Critical Debates (2010, special issue of Italian Studies). She has published numerous articles and book chapters on Italian women writers, Italian feminist theory, Italian Australian literature and Italian cinema. She is currently writing a book with Bernadette Luciano on Italian women filmmakers.