CCWW People

Francesca Cricelli holds a PhD in Literary Studies and Translation from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. During her research, she discovered an unpublished archive of nearly four hundred letters written by the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti to his last muse, Bruna Bianco. The archive had been inaccessible for over fifty years. During her doctoral research, Francesca organised, transcribed, and translated a selection of those letters from Italian into Portuguese. The letters are now available for public consultation at Fondazione Mondadori in Milan. Besides researching, Francesca has taught translation practices and creative writing in Brazil at Casa Guilherme de Almeida and Casa das Rosas, both institutions part of the State Government of São Paulo. She has worked as a literary translator for years, having translated into Portuguese Italian authors such as Elena Ferrante, Igiaba Scego, Claudia Durastanti, Paola Masino, Lisa Ginzburg, and Jhumpa Lahiri. During her time at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing she will be pursuing research on translingual authors, in a project entitled 'The crossroads of identity: translingualism and translation. A look into the latest works of Jhumpa Lahiri, Igiaba Scego, Helen Cova and Ewa Marcinek'. Since moving to Iceland in 2019, she has added to her research scope translingual women writers based in Iceland and, with this in mind, she will be also analysing the works of authors Helen Cova and Ewa Marcinek during her stay at ILCS. [October 2023-July 2024]

Lea Laura Heim is a PhD candidate at the European University Viadrina's Chiellino Research Unit for Literature and Migration in Frankfurt (Oder) and is currently a Sylvia Naish Visiting Scholar at the ILCS at the University of London. She completed her studies in German Literature and European Ethnology at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and at Marmara University in Istanbul. She pursued her Masters' degree in Literary Studies at the European University Viadrina and during this period spent a year at Lancaster University. Addressing contemporary themes in the German literary field, such as experiences of social and structural marginalisation due to attributed origin, gender, and class, her research investigates the literary strategies writers use to counter these exclusions on an artistic-aesthetic level. Her PhD project investigates the aesthetic practices in novels by Fatma Aydemir, Deniz Ohde, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, and Olivia Wenzel, focusing on how they express social criticism, challenge common reception habits, and oppose the burden of representation while demanding discursive participation. [October 2023-July 2024]

Sofía Medina López is an early career researcher at the University of Valencia. She is member of LENA research group (North American Ethnic Literatures in a Global context) and of the NAPCED research group in educational innovation, both at the University of Valencia. She is currently completing her PhD thesis which focuses on how eating disorders serve as coping mechanisms in a transethnic background. Her research interests encompass a wide range of topics, including gender studies, diaspora, post-colonialism, Caribbean female authors, trauma studies and medical humanities in particular eating disorders. She is interested in Critical Pedagogy and innovation in education as she is also a secondary school teacher. [January-April 2024]

Maria Morelli is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women Writers, where she is working on postcolonial first-person narratives by Italian and Portuguese women authors. She is also a member of the Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster based at De Montfort University, Leicester, and acts as external Evaluator for the European Commission. Dr Morelli completed her PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Leicester in 2017 with a thesis on Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza, and Dacia Maraini. From 2018 to 2021 she was Marie Curie Research Fellow in Modern Italian Studies at the University of Milan, where she taught classes on women’s theatre and feminist philosophy. She has taught Italian literature and language at the University of Kent, the University of Leicester, and at Wheaton College (USA) as a Fulbright grantee. Her research interests are in gender, sexuality, and embodiment in modern and contemporary Italian literature, on which she has published several articles and book chapters. She has co-edited the volume Women and the Public Sphere in Modern and Contemporary Italy (2017) and published the edited collection Il teatro cambia genere (2019). Her monograph, Queer(ing) Gender in Italian Women’s Writing (2021) is the winner of the Peter Lang Competition in Italian Studies and is featured in the 'Italian Modernities' book series of Peter Lang Oxford Publishing. Her research project at the ILCS applies multidisciplinary and gender perspectives to compare Italian and Portuguese texts around three key strands in women's postcolonial writing: home/homelessness and relationality; gender and racial identity; self-narratives of bodily and/or spatial exile. Taking into account the inextricability of the gender/race nexus, the project returns cultural agency to the postcolonial female writing subject, acknowledging the latter's role in actively shaping the literary and cultural norm in a way that challenges monolithic notions of gendered identity, Europe and Europeanness. [October 2023-July 2024]

Elisa Carandina currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Contemporary Hebrew Literature at the Département d’études hébraïques et juives at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris. She has recently published a book devoted to the suppressed stories of the other as a way to define the ars poetica of contemporary Israeli women poets and artists entitled La cura dell'accidentale: Forme di racconto di sé e dell'altra nella poesia ebraica e nell'arte israeliana contemporanea (2021). Her research interests include the theme of sacrifice and its rewritings, life-writing with particular focus on the representation of the self in graphic novels, and the female body in contemporary Israeli literary and artistic scene. [April-May 2023]

Dr Simona Di Martino holds a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick, where she also is a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies and a Teaching Assistant. Her research focuses on late 18th- and early 19th-century Italian poems and analyses how the reception of Dante’s work allows an interpretation of these texts as ‘Gothic’. She has published various peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on this and other topics, such as the Italian family novel and the figure of the wet nurse in Italian fiction. During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing she will deepen her interest in female characters and authors. Specifically, she will examine how the figure of the witch became an empowering model for young girls and how it shaped a rebellious but positive representation of girlhood in contemporary children’s and young adults’ Italian literature. Case studies are Bianca Pitzorno’s Streghetta mia and the comic magazines W.I.T.C.H created by Elisabetta Gnone. [March-July 2023]

Veronika Schuchter is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing. She previously researched and taught at the University of Oxford and was a Visiting Scholar at Nottingham Trent University. Her current research project explores the ethics and aesthetics of menopause writing in the 21st century in German, French, and English. Veronika is particularly interested in health humanities, feminist and queer theory, gender studies, contemporary women’s writing and has had articles published in Peer English, Text Matters, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and Studies in Canadian Literature. You can find her on Twitter @V_Schuchter. [October 2022-July 2023]

Françoise Campbell is an early career researcher working on questions of subjectivity, identification and ideological ambivalence in contemporary French and Francophone texts. She is also the Secretary and ECR representative of the newly formed 'Women in French Australia' research group, which aims to facilitate collaboration between Australia-based researchers of gender, feminism and women’s writing in French and Francophone cultural contexts. Since 2020, Françoise has co-edited a special issue of French Cultural Studies on transgression in the works of Michel Houellebecq and has taken part in online seminars, speaking about confinement in novels by Houellebecq and Chloé Delaume. Françoise is currently preparing an article on precarity and care in Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce, as well as a monograph based on her PhD thesis, tentatively titled La Poursuite de l’impossible: The Ambivalence of Utopia in the novels of Michel Houellebecq. [September 2020 – July 2021]

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Catherine Barbour is Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Surrey and OWRI Visiting Fellow at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing. She was previously Associate Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, where she completed her PhD on narrative by Galician women writers in 2016. Catherine’s research interests lie primarily in contemporary Spanish and Galician literatures, with a particular focus on migrant writing and writing by women. At the Institute, she will be examining translingual migrant identities in Galician and Spanish-language novels written by women of German and Romanian origin, as part of the OWRI project ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Communities’. Her monograph Contemporary Galician Women Writers is due to appear in 2020. [September-December 2018]

Deirdre Byrnes is Senior Lecturer in German at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research interests include GDR literature, contemporary women writers in German-language literature, generational memory transmission and contested memories. She has published extensively on Monika Maron, including a monograph Rereading Monika Maron: Text, Counter-Text and Context (2011). Her article 'Remembering at the Margins: Trauma, Memory Practices and the Recovery of Marginalised Voices at the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial' appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies in  2017. She is co-editor, together with Jean Conacher and Gisela Holfter, of German Reunification and the Legacy of GDR Literature and Culture (2018). As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, she will be exploring the media of testimony and the challenges of postmemory in Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe and Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther. [September-October 2018]

Adina Stroia is an early career researcher working on women’s life-writing and visual culture. She received a PhD from King’s College London for her AHRC-funded thesis entitled ‘Narratives of Loss and Mourning in Contemporary French Women’s Writing: Marie Nimier, Camille Laurens and Annie Ernaux’. Her research interests include life-writing, thanatology, temporality in autofiction, doubling and queerness, and visual culture. Her most recent publications include the article ‘Reconfigurations of Mourning in Contemporary French Women’s Writing’ in Études Francophones and the interview ‘Camille Laurens: L’écriture depuis soi’ in Dalhousie French Studies. As a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Women’s Writing, she will be investigating the process of ageing in Agnès Varda’s late documentary works. [September 2018-February 2019]

Catherine Barbour is currently Lecturer in Spanish at Queen’s University Belfast and OWRI Visiting Fellow at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing. She was previously Associate Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, where she completed her PhD on narrative by Galician women writers in 2016. Catherine’s research interests lie primarily in contemporary Spanish and Galician literatures, with a particular focus on migrant writing and writing by women. At the Institute, she will be examining translingual migrant identities in Galician and Spanish-language novels written by women of German and Romanian origin, as part of the OWRI project ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Communities’. Her monograph Contemporary Galician Women Writers is due to appear in 2019. [May-July 2018]

Jean Conacher is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing.  Her literary research focuses primarily on GDR and post-1989 literature and film, with a particular interest in cultural legacy. Recent publications include: 'Capturing the Zeitgeist: On human experience and personal historiography in Helga Königsdorf’s 1989 oder Ein Moment Schönheit' in Reunification and the Legacy of GDR Literature and Culture (2018),  'Adapting Hein’s Willenbrock: Andreas Dresen and the legacy of the GDR "ensemble" tradition' in Adaptation as a Collaborative Art – Process and Practice (2020), 'Women at work. Reflections on social identity and the private self in Die Polizistin (2000), Willenbrock (2005) and Steigerlied (2013)' in Andreas Dresen (2017), and 'Transformation and education in GDR youth literature: a script theory approach' (International Research in Children's Literature, 2016). She is currently completing a monograph on the portrayal of transformation and education in GDR literature to be published by Camden House. During her fellowship at the CCWW, she will be pursuing a study of the work of mathematician and writer Helga Königsdorf with a view to developing the first full-length critical treatment in English of her complete political and literary writings. [January–February 2018]

Giorgia Alù is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research interests range from 19th-century Italian cultural history to comparative literature and visual studies. She is the author of Beyond the Traveller’s Gaze: Expatriate Ladies Writing in Sicily (1848-1910) (2008), and has published numerous articles on travel writing, women’s writing, the relationship between literature and photography, and 19th-century visual representations of Italy. She has co-edited Enlightening Encounters. Photography in Italian Literature (2015) and special issues of journals on the interrelation between words and the visual. She is completing a monograph on contemporary women’s writing, mobility and photography, and working on a study on photography, identities and ethics in Italy, 1860-1920. [October 2016-January 2017]

Kate Willman recently completed her PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Warwick, under the supervision of Dr Jennifer Burns and Dr Fabio Camilletti. Her doctoral thesis analysed the recent literary phenomenon known as the New Italian Epic, a label that refers to a large corpus of hybrid texts that mix genres, styles and media. She argued that the New Italian Epic is an important stage in the development of the novel form in the 21st century. Before her PhD, she completed an MA in Comparative Literature at King's College London and a BA in French and Italian at the University of Bristol, where she also taught in the Italian Department during the academic year 2015-16. She is currently developing a comparative project on 21st-century autofiction and, during her Fellowship, she will focus particularly on autofiction by women writers.

Kate Averis is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris. She is the author of Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing (2014) and co-editor of Exiles,Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing (2016). Her research lies in the field of 20th- and 21st-century Francophone and Latin American literature, and more particularly, in women’s writing, transnational identities and cultures, writing of migration and exile, gender studies, and feminisms. Her current research project examines women’s ageing in contemporary women’s writing, and during her Fellowship at the Institute she will work on literary representations of migration and exile whose focus moves beyond the experience of arrival and transition to that of ‘settlement’ and ageing in displacement in the works of a range of Francophone and Latin American authors. [April-July 2016]

Anne Mulhall has recently completed her PhD thesis 'Tiqqun and the Event: Literature, Philosophy, Politics' at King’s College London. Her thesis interrogated the intersections between the conceptual persona and the theory of the ‘event’ in the work of the contemporary French philosophical collective, Tiqqun. From September 2015, Anne will commence work on her new research project, 'Philosophy, Redemption, and the New Women’s Literature of the Office', at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing. This project will read the emergence of a category of French and German women’s literature that offers a transformative approach to depictions of office life in the 21st century by emphasizing a capacity for resistance and redemption within the contemporary administrative experience. She is completing an article on early 2000s’ women’s psycho-geographical experimentation in France. Anne’s translation of Marc Décimo’s ‘Marcel Duchamp et la Collège de ’Pataphysique’ for Pataphysics Then and Now is to appear in 2015. Anne has previously held scholarships at New York University and University College Dublin. [September 2015-June 2016]

Maria Cristina Seccia is an early career researcher in Italian and Translation Studies. Her doctoral thesis 'Translating Caterina Edwards’ The Lion’s Mouth: A Case of Cultural Translation in Practice' (Bangor, 2014) explores the link between cultural translation and Italian-Canadian literature through the lens of postcolonial theories and from a practice-led perspective. Her articles and book chapters have been published in the journal Italian Canadiana and in volumes of Italian-Canadian literature, while some translations of poems have appeared in the Journal of Italian Translation. Maria Cristina has co-edited the volume Writing Cultural Difference: Italian-Canadian Creative and Critical Works (2015) and is currently co-organising the 16th AICW (Association of Italian Canadian Writers) biennial conference 'Italian-Canadian Literature: Departures, Journeys, Destinations'. During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing she will work on her new research project, which will explore the representation of the mother-daughter relationship in Italian migrant women’s writing from a translation studies perspective. More specifically, she will examine how the migrant women narrators’ relationship with their Italian mothers affects their own transcultural and transnational identity, as well as the approach towards their mother tongue and motherland. [September 2015-June 2016]

S.A. Smythe is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing and is currently completing a PhD in History of Consciousness called 'L'Italia Meticcia: Belonging and Blackness in Postcolonial Italy' along with concentrations in Literature and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. During her stay, she will further explore themes of migritude, blackness, and gender identity in 20th- and 21st century Italian-East African writing. [October 2015-June 2016]

Tegan Zimmerman (PhD, Comparative Literature, University of Alberta) is College Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Okanagan College for the 2015-16 academic year. Her work focuses on contemporary women’s historical novels, especially those from the Caribbean, and on contemporary gender theory. Zimmerman is the Canadian Liaison Officer for the Comparative Gender Studies Committee (an official committee of the International Comparative Literature Association), and has published articles in Gender Forum, the Journal of Feminist Studies, and Simone de Beauvoir Studies. Her article “Feminism and Marxism: Revisiting Irigaray’s Essay ‘Women on the Market’ in a Postfeminist Era” is forthcoming in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her dissertation Writing Back Through Our Mothers: A Transnational Feminist Study on the Woman’s Historical Novel was published by Lit-Verlag in 2014. During her Fellowship she will work on her new monograph, provisionally entitled Matria Redux: Caribbean Women’s Historical Fiction [May-June 2016].

Dr Natalie Edwards is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Adelaide. Her research concentrates on late 20th- and early 21st-century French women’s writing, feminist theory, autobiography and visual studies. Among her publications are Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Women’s Autobiography and Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography (edited with Amy Hubbell and Ann Miller, 2011).  During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing, she will be completing a manuscript entitled Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering in Contemporary France. [January-February 2015]

Eglė Kačkutė is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Vilnius University Gender Studies' Centre. Her monograph Savi svetimi tapatumai naujausioje britų ir prancūzų moterų literatūroje [Familiar and Strange Identities in Contemporary British and French Women’s Writing] was published in 2012. Her research interests include contemporary women’s writing in English, French, and Lithuanian, identity, gender and contemporary feminist theory. During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing she will focus on motherhood and maternal subjectivity in a culturally and linguistically foreign environment. [October 2014]

Claudia Karagoz is an Associate Professor of Italian and Women’s and Gender Studies, and a member of the Core Faculty staff at the Center for Intercultural Studies at Saint Louis University. Her research interests include contemporary Italian women’s writing, photography, and film, motherhood studies, and Sicilian culture. She has co-edited a volume on Sicily and the Mediterranean (forthcoming 2015), and published articles and book chapters on Italian women writers, filmmakers and photographers such as Rosetta Loy, Elsa Morante, Francesca Comencini, and Letizia Battaglia. During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing she will be working on a book project entitled Demeter’s Journey: Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Italian Women’s Writing and Cinema. [February-April 2015]

Elsa Laflamme teaches French and literature at the Collège Gérald-Godin, a post-secondary institution in Montréal, Canada. In 2013, she completed her PhD in French Literature at the Université de Montréal. Entitled ‘Récit de l’événement et événement du récit chez Annie Ernaux, Hélène Cixous et Maurice Blanchot’, her thesis was conducted under the impulse of both Jacques Derrida’s thought and that of psychoanalysis, focusing on the events in the making in Ernaux, Cixous and Blanchot’s writings. She is now working on a book proposal to publish her thesis. Her article ‘Hélène Cixous et le génie’ spectral' will appear in Esprit créateur (2015). During her stay at the Centre for the Study on Contemporary Women’s Writing, she will concentrate her research on her post-doctoral project entitled ‘Hélène Cixous’ Monsters: Propositions for an Ethics of/at the Limits’. She regularly contributes to Spirale, a Canadian journal dedicated to arts and humanities. [September 2014-June 2015]

Ana Gabriela Macedo is Professor of  English Literature at the University of Minho, Portugal. She is Director of the 'Humanities Research Centre' (CEHUM) where her main areas of research are comparative literature; feminist and gender studies; interarts and visual poetics; English literature (Modernism and Postmodernism). Among her publications are Paula Rego e o Poder da Visão. ‘A minha pintura é como uma história interior’ (2010) and Dicionário da Crítica Feminista, edited with Ana Luísa Amaral (2005). During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing she will be engaged in developing a project and book entitled Framing/Unframing, Resisting. Ways of ‘seeing differently’. Women and Gender in Contemporary Art and Literature. [October 2014-June 2015]

Michela Baldo is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing at the Institute. Her doctoral thesis (Manchester, 2009) dealt with the translation into Italian of Italian-Canadian writing, focusing on the treatment of multilingualism in the translation of the trilogy of one of the best-known Italian-Canadian writers, Nino Ricci. She held a teaching fellowship in translation studies at the University of Birmingham, and is currently employed by the Università per stranieri di Siena, where she researches into subtitling and intercultural communication. She has written articles on Italian-Canadian works and their written and audio-visual translation into Italian, the most recent of which, published in the journal Translation Studies, is on translations by the Italian publishing house Cosmo Iannone editore. During her stay at the Institute she will be investigating more broadly the reception through translation of Italian-Canadian and Italian-American women writers in Italy (especially the recent translations of Louise de Salvo, Kym Ragusa and Mary di Michele). She is particularly interested in looking at the role played by this imported literature in the construction and representation of concepts like ‘Italianness’ and ‘foreignness’ in Italy and abroad. Another strand of research she is pursuing is the investigation of the concept ‘queer’, and its migration/translation into the Italian cultural sphere. Baldo has published articles on this topic and, in June 2013, was involved in the organization of the first queer ‘femme’ conference in Italy, held in Rome. She is currently working on a co-authored/co-edited book on drag kings in Italy, due to be published by ETS in December 2013. [September 2013-June 2014]

Simone Brioni is Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University, in the Department of European Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. He received his PhD from the University of Warwick, where he was an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies. His doctoral thesis, 'The Somali Within: Questions of Language, Resistance and Identity', deals with the work of writers of Somali origin in Italian. Using cultural studies, translation studies and postcolonial theory, his work analyses the literary and cinematographic representation of migration and Italian colonialism. He edited the volumes Somalitalia:.Quattro vie per Mogadiscio (2012) and Aulò! Aulò! Aulò! Poesie di nostalgia, d’esilio e d’amore (2012) by Ribka Sibhatu, which respectively contain the documentaries Aulò. Roma postcoloniale and La quarta via. Mogadiscio Italia, for which he was co-director and co-author. His publications also include J.G. Ballard. Il futuro quotidiano (2011). [September 2013-September 2014]

Francesca Calamita is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing at the Institute. She completed her PhD at the Victoria University of Wellington where she is currently a Teaching Fellow in Italian in the School of Languages and Cultures.  Her doctoral thesis dealt with the fictional depiction of eating disorders in Italian women’s writings from the end of the 19th century to the 1960s. Francesca’s research interest focuses on the representation of women’s relationship with food and body from a feminist perspective as well as the fictional portrayal of psychopathologies and she has published articles and book chapters in this area. She is currently co-editing a volume on new perspectives on Italian gender studies. At the Institute she will work on the research project 'Addiction, Compulsion and Starvation: Eating Disorders as a Mean of Self-empowerment in Contemporary Italian Women’s Writing (1990-2011)' in preparation for the publication of her doctoral dissertation. [December 2013-July 2014] 

Dr Marie Carrière teaches Francophone and Comparative literature and is Director of the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta. She recently published a monograph titled Médée protéiforme (2012). She is also the author of Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada: A Question of Ethics (2002). She is co-editor of Migrance comparée/Comparing Migrations (2008) and Les réécrivains (2011). Her research focuses on feminism, ethics, and contemporary writing. [May 2013]

Teresa Louro received her PhD and MA from the University of London. She was course leader for the BA in Gender in Text and History (Goldsmiths College) and programme leader for the Gender and Sexuality Seminar Series (IES, University of London). She has published on James Joyce, the fin de siècle, and contemporary Portuguese women’s poetry. She is currently working on editing a collected volume on Portuguese contemporary poet Ana Luísa Amaral as part of CCWW’s 'Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing Series'. [June-July 2012]