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Giorgia Alù

PhD (Warwick) MA (Warwick) BA (Catania)
Lecturer
Room 721, Brennan MacCallum Building A18

+61 2 9351 6887

GIORGIA ALÙ completed a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Warwick (UK). Her research interests range from nineteenth-century Italian cultural history to comparative literature and visual studies. She has taught at the University of Warwick and at the University of Reading (UK).

Research Areas

  • Travel writing;
  • Nineteenth-century representations of Italy;
  • Relationship between literature and photography;
  • Memory and migration in contemporary women’s writing.

Current Projects

  • A book on women’s writing, expatriation and photography;
  • A study of Italian migration through photographic portraits.

Selected Publications

Books

  • Word and Image, East and West. Eds. Giorgia Alù and Francesco Borghesi. Special Issue of Literature & Aesthetics 22/2 (2012). Forthcoming.
  • Enlightening Encounters: Interactions Between Italian Narrative and Photography. Eds. Giorgia Alù and Nancy Pedri (forthcoming)
  • Beyond the Traveller’s Gaze: British Expatriate Women in Sicily (1848-1910) Peter Lang: New York/Oxford, 2008

Articles in international refereed journals

  • 'Fabricating home: performances of belonging and domesticity in contemporary women’s travel writing in English about Italy', Studies in Travel Writing, 14, 3 (2010), 285-302.
  • ‘Re-locating the Past: Photographs, Family and Migration Stories in Anna Maria Riccardi’s Cronache dalla collina and Elena Gianini Belotti’s Pane amaro’, The Italianist, 1 (2010), 99-118.
  • ‘Writing the familial past: historical and personal memoir in Sicily and England: Political and Social Reminiscences, 1848-1870, by Tina Scalia Whitaker’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, vol.8 (2006), 213-242.
  • ‘Pan, the Saint and the Peasant: Southern Italian Bodies Imag(in)ed at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Mediterranean Studies, vol.14 (2005), 203-224.
  • ‘The Unknown Sicily of Louise Hamilton Caico’, Studies in Travel Writing, 6 (2002), 78-95.

Articles in books and other contributions

  • ‘Sulle tracce del passato: memoria e frammentazione familiare in Vita di Melania Mazzucco e La masseria delle allodole di Antonia Arslan’. In Tempo e memoria nella lingua e nella letteratura italiana. Eds. C. Salvadori Lonergan, B. Van Der Bosche and M. Bastiaensen, (Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2009), pp. 363-374.
  • ‘Framing life: British women’s visual narratives of Sicily at the beginning of the 20th century’, in Le Mezzogiorno des écrivains européens / Europeans Writing the Mezzogiorno, ed. by Béatrice Bijon, Yves Clavaron and Bernard Dieterle, (St-Etienne: Presses Universitaires de St-Etienne, 2006), pp.175-185.
  • ‘Beyond the observation of the “travelled reader”, in Bridges and Boundaries. Warwick Working Papers in Cultural Studies, ed. by S. Chotiudompant with E. Minutella (University of Warwick: Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, 2002), pp. 21-30. ISBN 0-9542465-0-0.

Teaching Areas

  • Contemporary Italian literature and culture;
  • Literature and cinema;
  • Language and translation;
  • Supervision of PhD, MPhil and Honours dissertations.

Conference Activity

  • Organised: “Enlightening Encounters: Italian Literature and Photography Through Time”, 12-14 March 2009, University of Warwick (UK).
  • ‘Attraverso i vetri colorati dell’esistenza: parole e immagini nella scrittura migrante di Ornela Vorpsi’. ACIS -Fifth Biennal (University of Auckland, NZ, 18-21 February, 2009).
  • ‘Photographs, family and migration stories”. Invited to a one-day workshop (University of Victoria, Wellington, NZ, 30 October 2008)
  • ‘Gazing at the past: memory and photography in women’s writing about migration’, AAIS and AATI Conference (Taormina, 22-25 May 2008);
  • ‘Narrative, memory and photography in contemporary Italian women's writings about migration’, Photography: Theory, Practice and Debate, Study Day, Institute of Romance Studies (London, 7 July 2007);
  • ‘Visual “truths”: British women’s photographic representation of Southern Italy’, Crossings and Borders VI (University of Palermo, 7-9 September 2006);
  • ‘Memoria ed espatrio in Melania Mazzucco ed Antonia Arslan’. AIPI – Associazione Internazionale Professori d’Italiano Conferente (Ascoli Piceno, August 2006);
  • ‘Through the Archives of the Past: Memory and Expatriation in Contemporary Italian Women’s Writings’. AAIS - American Association of Italian Studies Conference (Genova, 25-28 May 2006);
  • ‘Alla ricerca di una casa. Le straniere oggi tra desiderio domestico e fuga in Italia’. Italia terra di rifugio (CIRVI and University of Turin, 3-4 June 2005);
  • ‘Searching for a New Home: Italy in the Writings of Contemporary British Expatriate Women’. Contemporary European Women Writers: Gender and Generation (University of Bath, 30 March-1 April 2005);
  • ‘Biografia, storia individuale e memoria collettiva nelle opere di Giuliana Saladino’. Shaping the Past: Questions of Identity in Italian Films and Literary Works since the 1980s (Italian Cultural Institute and Libre Université Brussels, 28-29 October 2004);
  • ‘Pan, the Saint and the Peasant: Southern Bodies Imag(in)ed at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’. In corpore (im)material bodies in Italy, from the Middle Ages to the present days (Institute of Romance Studies, London, 16-17 April 2004).
  • ‘Desired, disguized and idealized Sicily: Von Gloeden’s Arcadian Photographs’. Crossings & Borders III (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, 10-13 July 2002).
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