CCWW Research Profiles
Giorgia Alù is Associate Professor (Reader) in Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on travel writing, women’s writing, the relationship between photography and literature, and photographic culture. She is the author of Beyond the Traveller’s Gaze: Expatriate Ladies Writing in Sicily (1848-1910) (2008) and Journeys Exposed: Women’s Writing, Photography, and Mobility (2019), and co-editor of Enlightening Encounters. Photography in Italian Literature (2015). Her publications also include articles on contemporary women writers in Italy such as Melania Mazzucco, Carla Cerati, and Ornela Vorpsi, and special issues of journals on the interrelation between words and the visual. Dr Alù is currently working on the interrelation between written and visual texts and subjection and solidarity in Italy (1860-1960), as well as on the engagement of Italian female photographers with issues of ethics and aesthetics and their contribution to the transmission and preservation of the Italian cultural heritage since the 19th century. She is also Chief Investigator of a collaborative ARC Discovery Project, ‘Opening Australia’s Multilingual Archive’ (2021-24), which mobilises Australia’s non-English language resources to examine its history from non-English perspectives.
Gillian Ania is Lecturer and Researcher in Italian at the University of Bangor. She writes on contemporary Italian narrative and poetry. Her publications cover the works of individual authors (Leonardo Sciascia, Dacia Maraini, Paola Capriolo, Tullio Avoledo, Enrico Palandri) and themes such as literary representations of 9/11, apocalypse and dystopia, 1960s-70s narrative, epistolary fiction and literary translation. She has also published a book of poetry, and three translated novels.
Andrew Asibong is a Film Theorist and Psychotherapist, and was Senior Lecturer in the Department of European Cultures and Languages at Birkbeck, University of London, where he was also co-director of the research centre Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community (BRAKC). His research focuses on the radical reconfiguration of subjectivity and intersubjective modes of relationality in the contemporary arts, drawing especially on fantastical or pseudo-fantastical films and fictions, mainly psychoanalytic forms of psychotherapy, and the ethics and politics of class and stigma. He has published articles on the writers Jacques Stephen Alexis, Marie Chauvet, Marie Darrieussecq, Mohammed Dib, Hervé Guibert, and Marie NDiaye, and on the filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Gregg Araki, Claire Denis, Georges Franju, François Ozon and Alain Resnais. He is the author of François Ozon (2008) and co-editor (with Shirley Jordan) of Marie NDiaye: l’étrangeté à l’œuvre (2009). He is currently preparing a monograph entitled Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition.
Kate Averis is an independent researcher and formerly lectured at the University of London's Institute in Paris (ULIP). She is the author of Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing (Legenda, 2014) and the co-editor of Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing (University of Wales Press, 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, translingual writing, literatures of migration and exile, gender studies, and feminisms. She has worked on the impact of crossing geographical borders and changing languages on women’s identity both in the immediate aftermath of displacement and over time, publishing on Nancy Huston, Laura Restrepo, Linda Lê and Cristina Siscar, amongst others. Her current research project examines women’s ageing in in the works of a range of Francophone and Latin American authors.
Catherine Barbour is Assistant Professor in 20th- and 21st-Century Spanish Peninsular Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She specializes in contemporary Iberian literary and cultural studies, with particular interests in women’s writing and women’s audio-visual production, Galician studies, migration and translingual literature. Her work has been published in the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, English in Education, International Journal of Iberian Studies, Journal of Romance Studies and Parallax and she is author of the monograph Contemporary Galician Women Writers, published by Legenda in 2020. Catherine leads the multidisciplinary research network ‘Women’s (Im)Mobility in Times of Crisis’, a collaboration with the University of São Paulo. She is an elected member of the executive committee of the Modern Language Association Galician Forum.
Dr Claudia Bernardi completed her BA (Hons) at the University of Bologna, and her MA in Women and Literature at the University of Hull. Her PhD thesis, for the University of Bath, discussed literary tradition, avant-garde, youth culture, and gender in the new Italian narrative of the 1990s. In 2000 she joined the School of Languages and Cultures of Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where she is now Senior Lecturer in Italian. Her research and publications focus on contemporary Italian women’s writing from the 20th century to the present, film and film adaptations of literary works, and the intersection between gender, politics, and cultural representation.
Marina Bettaglio is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Victoria in Canada. Her research interests centre on gender and media studies in contemporary Spain, Latin America, and Italy. Her recent publications include Rappresentare la violenza di genere. Sguardi femministi tra critica, attivismo e scrittura, co-edited with Nicoletta Mandolini and Silvia Ross (Mimesis, 2018), Con el lápiz en la mano. Mujeres y comics a ambos lados del Atlántico, a Special Issue of Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos co-edited with Elizabeth Montes Garcés and María Elsy Cardona (2019), and the collection Poetas italianas contemporáneas en la Querella de las Mujeres (Dykinson, 2020). She is also the author of numerous articles on motherhood in Spanish and Italian culture. She currently holds an SSHRC Insight Grant to research ‘Maternal Self-Expression in Spanish Graphic Narratives: Beyond Patriarchy and Neoliberalism?' (2020-2025).
Elizabeth Boa is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Nottingham and a Fellow of the British Academy. Along with studies of Wedekind, Kafka, and German Heimat discourse, she has published widely on women writers, notably Ingeborg Bachmann and Christa Wolf. She is co-editor with Janet Wharton of Women and the Wende: Social Effects and Cultural Reflections of the German Unification Process, German Monitor 31 (1994), and with Heike Bartel of Anne Duden: A Revolution of Words, German Monitor 56 (2003) and of Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck, German Monitor 64 (2006).
Suzan Bozkurt recently completed her PhD thesis on contemporary Portuguese women’s writing, entitled ‘Beyond the Mirror: Mechanisms of Transgressing the Canon in the Fiction of Contemporary Portuguese Women Writers (1980-2010)’ at the University of Manchester, under the supervision of Professor Hilary Owen. She has published widely on contemporary women’s writing in Portugal and on translation theory. Her most recent publications are an article on the Portuguese translations of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in Comparative Critical Studies (October 2013), an introduction to Teolinda Gersão’s work, and an introduction and translations of Luísa Costa Gomes’s short stories in the volume Contar um Conto (CEAUL, University of Lisbon, 2016). Her research interests are gender studies, digital media and translation theory.
Simone Brioni is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Africana Studies and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. He specialises in the literary and cinematographic representation and self-representation of migrants, postcolonial theory, 'postcolonial' literatures and cultures with particular emphasis on contemporary Italy. On these topics he co-authored the following documentaries: Aulò (2012, directed with Graziano Chiscuzzu and Ermanno Guida, written with Ribka Sibhatu), La quarta via (2012, directed with Graziano Chiscuzzu and Ermanno Guida, written with Kaha Mohamed Aden), Maka (2022, with/about Geneviève Makaping, directed by Elia Moutamid). Publications in this area include: The Somali Within (2015), Scrivere di Islam (2020, co-authored with Shirin Ramzanali Fazel), The Horn of Africa and Italy (2018, co-edited with Shimelis Bonsa Gulema), and L'Italia, l'altrove (2022).
Katie Brown teaches contemporary Spanish and Latin American culture at the University of Bristol. Her main research interest is the role of contemporary literature and visual culture in the creation, representation and questioning of identities, especially national, regional or supranational identities. This includes the study of translations and adaptations, and how these influence the ideas of one culture held by another. Katie holds a PhD on literature in Venezuela under the 'Bolivarian Revolution' from King's College London (2016). She is co-editor of Crude Words, an anthology of Venezuelan writing in English, for which she translated six stories.
Francesca Calamita is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Virginia (UVa), where she is based in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, affiliated to the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality, and is a recently appointed College of Arts and Sciences Fellow in the Engagements. She is also Programme Director of UVa in Italy. She obtained her PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 2013 and conducted postdoctoral research at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing of the Institute of Modern Languages Research (University of London) as a Visiting Fellow in 2014. Her research interests concern transnational feminist issues in women’s writing, cinema, and pop culture, with a particular focus on food disorders. She is the author of the monograph Linguaggi dell’esperienza femminile. Disturbi alimentari, donne e scrittura dall’Unità al miracolo economico (Il Poligrafo, 2015) and co-editor of Starvation, Food Obsession and Identity: Eating Disorders in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Peter Lang, 2017) and Food and Women in Italian Literature, Culture and Society: Eve’s Sinful Bite (Bloomsbury, 2020). She has also published extensively in the area of gender equality in second-language acquisition.
Dominique Carlini Versini is Assistant Professor (Teaching) in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Durham. She completed her PhD in French studies at the University of Kent and the Université Paris Diderot. Her research project entitled 'Le corps dans tous ses excès' compares and contrasts corporeal representations in the works of Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Laurence Nobécourt and Marina de Van. In particular, it reflects upon the omnipresence of obscene bodies in the work of these artists and questions ways in which the materiality of the body can be inscribed in the text or the film. The study also seeks to investigate the reader’s or viewer’s visceral engagement in the works. Her research draws on feminist theory, gender studies and recent theory on haptic visuality and extreme aesthetics.
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]
Mirna Cicioni is an Affiliate Research Fellow in Italian Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, and has taught Italian for over 30 years in tertiary institutions in the UK and Australia. She has published an introductory monograph on Primo Levi (Primo Levi – Bridges of Knowledge, 1995) and co-edited Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian Culture (with Nicole Prunster, 1993) and Differences, Deceits and Desires: Murder and Mayhem in Italian Crime Fiction (with Nicoletta Di Ciolla, 2008). She has written on Italian women's movements and on post-World War II Italian-Jewish writers, and is currently working on an article on humour and irony in Clara Sereni’s last three works and on an essay on male pair-bonds in Hollywood Westerns and Italian Westerns.
Amaleena Damlé is Associate Professor in Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Durham. Her research interests lie in intersections between modern and contemporary thought and literature, with a particular emphasis on gender and sexuality. Her previous research considered representations of female corporeality and transformation in contemporary women’s writing in French, in dialogue with Deleuzian philosophy and recent (post)feminist and queer thought, and her book – Perpetually Becoming: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French – is forthcoming in 2013 with Edinburgh University Press. Her principal new project looks at notions of love, desire and ethics in modern and contemporary French culture; co-editing, with Professor Gill Rye, three volumes of essays on contemporary women’s writing in French. She has written articles on Nina Bouraoui, Marie Darrieussecq, Ananda Devi and Amélie Nothomb, and is the co-editor of The Beautiful and the Monstrous: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture (Berne: Peter Lang, 2010).
Sandra Daroczi is Lecturer in Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath, having completed her PhD at the University of Exeter. Her work centres around the question of ‘how we read women’, analysing the reception of contemporary French women writers. Her current research focuses on the work of Julia Kristeva, Marie Darrieussecq and Monique Wittig, simultaneously trying to articulate reception and intertextuality within a wider theory of the other. Her other interests include: gender studies and theories of the other; the portrayal of marginal groups in literature and other cultural media; Francophonie; and the promotion of language learning.
Noèlia Diaz-Vicedo teaches Spanish and contemporary literature at Queen Mary, University of London, and at the University of Westminster. Her field of research focuses on Spanish women’s writing of the 20th century, with special attention to Catalan women writers. Her PhD thesis ‘Constructing Feminine Poetics in the Works of a Late-20th-Century Catalan Woman Poet: Maria-Mercè Marçal’ was published by the MHRA in 2014. As a translator, she has translated Marçal’s posthumous poetry collection Raó del cos (The Body’s Reason) along with Montserrat Abelló, and she is co-editor of the literary magazine Alba Londres: Culture in Translation.
Adam Elgar is a poet and a translator. His poems have appeared in a range of journals including Poetry Review, Stand, Warwick Review, Magma, Orbis, and Iota. His translation of Alessandra Lavagnino’s novella Truth and Flies is published by Troubador Storia. His translation of her novella Elizabeth the Mother and of the Don Camillo stories by Giovanni Guareschi are published by Pilot Productions. He collaborates with the poet Paolo Febbraro and in non-fiction he translates for The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Rivista di Psicoanalisi, and the Vatican Museums.
Jessica Falconi was awarded a PhD in Iberian Studies from the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ for her dissertationon representations of national identity in Mozambican poetry, which was published in Italy in 2008. From 2007 to 2013 she taught Brazilian literature and Portuguese language at Naples. She is currently the holder of a post-doctoral research grant awarded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia at the Research Centre on Africa, Asia and Latin America (CEsA) at the University of Lisbon (Ulisboa). Falconi has published various articles in international journals and has co-edited a book of interviews with Angolan and Mozambican writers (Berne: Peter Lang, 2014). She is involved in various research projects on African literature and cinema.
Evelyn Ferraro is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Santa Clara University, CA, USA. Her scholarship explores the relationships between Italianità perceived and constructed as national belonging and the transnational identities resulting from old and new mobilities. Her teaching and research interests include late 19th, 20th and 21st-century Italian literature, culture, and cinema, with a focus on Italy’s global connections, as resulting from migrations (from and to Italy), colonisations, liminal spaces, and cultural crossings. She holds a Laurea in Foreign Languages and Literatures/English (University of Palermo, Italy), MAs in Translation and Comparative Literature (University of Essex, UK) and Italian Language and Literature (University of Pittsburgh), and a PhD in Italian Studies (Brown University). She is the recipient of the inaugural 2020 Leonardo Award in the Humanities (Italian Scientists and Scholars of North America Foundation, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter and the Leonardo da Vinci Society of San Francisco), the National Italian American Foundation Fellowship, and the American Italian Historical Association Memorial Fellowship.
Carine Fréville is Assistant Lecturer at the University of Kent Paris School of Arts and Culture. Following undergraduate studies in French at London Guildhall University and at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and a MA by research on identity, voice and desire in Violette Leduc’s autobiographical works, she wrote her doctorate on the representations of trauma in the works of Marie Darrieussecq, Malika Mokeddem and Lorette Nobécourt at the Centre d’Études Féminines et d’Études de Genre at the Université Paris VIII (France). She has published articles on spectrality and mourning in the works of Marie Darrieussecq, on the rewriting of traumatic events and on identity and gender issues in the works of Malika Mokeddem, as well as on abortion and maternal violence in the works of Lorette Nobécourt. She recently co-edited with Dr Ana de Medeiros (Kent) a collection of essays entitled Contemporary Women’s Representations of Wounded Bodies and Minds (International Journal of Francophone Studies, 15.2, 2012).
Dr Adalgisa Giorgio holds an Honorary Senior Lectureship in Italian Studies at the University of Bath after recently retiring from an Associate Professorship in the same university. She has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Centre for the Study of Women’s Writing (CCWW) at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR) since its foundation in 2009 and coordinates the Italian author pages of the Centre. She is also a member of the editorial board of the Institute’s Journal of Romance Studies and of Italian Culture, the journal of the American Association of Italian Studies (AAIS). Her main areas of research are post-1968 Italian women’s writing, especially Fabrizia Ramondino and Marosia Castaldi; narratives of motherhood and the mother-daughter bond; post-1993 narratives on Naples; and the Italian diaspora in New Zealand. The following publications ensued from the activities of the AHRC-funded ‘Motherhood in post-1968 European Literature Network’ of the CCWW: a co-edited special section of Women’s Studies International Forum (2015) on mothering and migration in Europe; a special section of the Journal of Romance Studies (2015) on motherhood and work in Italy; the co-edited volume Motherhood in Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe (Routledge 2018). Her articles on Māori-Italian identities have appeared in the New Zealand Journal of Psychology (2019) and Social Identities (2020). She is currently supervising two PhD students working on African women writers and the 18th-century opera singer Margherita Durastanti and her London season.
Chiara Giuliani teaches Italian Literature and Culture in the Department of Italian at University College Cork, where she has been a Lecturer since 2016. Her main research interests are questions of home, memory and material culture in postcolonial narratives, in particular in the ways in which ordinary places are turned into home. This was also the topic of her PhD, obtained in 2015 from the University of St Andrews, and of a forthcoming monograph (Home, Memory and Belonging in Italian Postcolonial Literature, Palgrave). More recently she has been working on the cultural representation of the Chinese community in Italy, especially the role played by 2nd-generation Chinese-Italians.
Monica Jansen is Assistant Professor of Italian Literature in the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication (TLC) - Italian Language and Culture, Utrecht University. Her research interests include modernism and postmodernism studies, and more specifically new forms of cultural engagement. She investigates cultural representations of socially relevant topics such as religion, precarity, youth, and migration, from an interdisciplinary, transmedial and transnational perspective. Her publications include: Il dibattito sul postmoderno in Italia: In bilico tra dialettica e ambiguità (Franco Cesati, 2002); a number of co-edited volumes, of which The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies (Lexington books, 2012), Le culture del precariato. Pensiero, azione, narrazione (ombre corte, 2015), Televisionismo. Narrazioni televisive della storia italiana negli anni della seconda Repubblica (edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2015), and 'Futurism and the Sacred' (International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, 11, 2022); special journal issues, articles and book chapters. She is co-editor-in-chief of Annali d’italianistica and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies. She is a director of the book series Moving Texts (Peter Lang).
Emily Jeremiah’s research interests include gender, ethics, mothering, translation, and transnationalism. She is the author of Troubling Maternity: Mothering, Agency, and Ethics in Women’s Writing in German of the 1970s and 1980s (Maney/MHRA, 2003), and of a forthcoming monograph, Nomadic Ethics in Contemporary Women’s Writing in German: Strange Subjects (Camden House, 2012). With Frauke Matthes, she is currently co-editing Ethical Approaches in Contemporary German-Language Literature and Culture (Edinburgh German Yearbook 7, 2013). Emily is also an award-winning translator of Finnish poetry and fiction. Her translations include Eeva-Liisa Manner, Bright, Dusky, Bright (Waterloo Press, 2009), and Asko Sahlberg, The Brothers (translated with Fleur Jeremiah, Peirene Press, 2012).
Jonny Johnston is a final year doctoral researcher at Trinity College Dublin, based in the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute. His doctoral research is supervised by Professor Jürgen Barkhoff and investigates the emergence of postcolonial fiction in contemporary Switzerland. He is also interested in wider issues of cultural identity and minority writing, foreign language education, and expressions of gender in foreign language education. His research is funded by the Irish Research Council and has also attracted funding from the Swiss Federal Government, which enabled him to spend a year at the University of Basle as a visiting researcher.
Shirley Jordan is Professor of French Studies at Newcastle University and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing at the ILCS in London. She has published on 20th- and 21st-century women's writing in French, on art and art criticism, on photography (including photobiography and contemporary city photography) and on experimental self-narrative across media. She has written chapters and articles on Marie Darrieussecq, Marie NDiaye, Christine Angot, Lorette Nobécourt, Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Amélie Nothomb, Sophie Calle, Agnès Varda, Camille Laurens, and Chantal Akerman. She has also written on the art critical texts of Nathalie Heinich. Major publications include Contemporary French Women's Writing (Lang, 2004), Marie NDiaye: Inhospitable Fictions (Legenda, 2017), and the co-edited volumes Marie NDiaye: l'étrangeté à l'oeuvre (Septentrion, 2009), Watch this Space: Women's Conceptualisations of Space in Contemporary French Film and Visual Art (Esprit Créateur, 2011), Cities Interrupted: Visual Culture and Urban Space (Bloomsbury, 2015) and a co-edited volume on form in contemporary French literature, What Forms Can Do: Attending to the Real in 20th- and 21st-Century French Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2020). Professor Jordan's current research focuses predominantly on women's experiences and representations of ageing and old age in France and beyond. She is working on several related projects, including a monograph on photographer Martine Franck for which she received a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship ('Ageing, Care and (In)visibility: The Forgotten Photography of Martine Franck', 2022-23). She is Series Editor of the book series 'Cultures of Ageing and Care' with De Gruyter publishers.
Anna M. Klobucka is Professor of Portuguese and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She is the author of O Formato Mulher: A Emergência da Autoria Feminina na Poesia Portuguesa (Coimbra: Angelus Novus, 2009) and The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth (Bucknell UP, 2000), published in Portuguese as Mariana Alcoforado: Formação de um Mito Cultural (Lisboa: IN-CM, 2006). She has also co-edited After the Revolution: Twenty Years of Portuguese Literature 1974-1994 (with Helena Kaufman; Bucknell, 1997) and Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality (with Mark Sabine; University of Toronto Press, 2007), the latter published in Portuguese translation as O Corpo em Pessoa: Corporalidade, Género, Sexualidade ( Assírio & Alvim, 2010). Her current research focuses primarily on representations of gender and sexuality in Portuguese literature and culture from the late 19th century to the present. She also serves as Executive Editor of the recently launched online open-access Journal of Feminist Scholarship.
Barbara Kornacka is Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, specializing in Italian contemporary literature. She obtained two Master's Degrees in 1994 (History of Art) and 1996 (Romance Languages and Literature), her PhD in 2000, and her 'habilitation' in 2017. Her research interests focus on the body and corporeality and she has published on sexuality, gender, queer, sensory perception, and disease in Italian contemporary fiction. She is particularly interested in the work of Dacia Maraini, Melania Mazzucco, Margaret Mazzantini, Isabella Santacroce, and Goliarda Sapienza. Her book Ucho, oko, ciało. O prozie „młodych pisarzy” lat osiemdziesiątych i dziewięćdziesiątych we Włoszech (Poznań 2013; [Ear,eye, body]). The narrative of young writers of the 1980s and 1990s in Italy) won the 2014 Flaiano Prize in Italian Studies. She is also the author of Fenomen 'młodych pisarzy' w literaturze włoskiej końca XX wieku (Poznań 2016; [The phenomenon of young writers in Italian literature at the end of the 20th century]) and of articles on Italian postcolonial writing, especially on Igiaba Scego and Gabriella Ghermandi.
Alexandra Kurmann is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney. She received her MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Kent at Canterbury and her PhD, entitled 'Lecteur Idéal, Lecteur Imaginaire: The Intertextual Relationship Fostered by Linda Lê with an Imaginary Ingeborg Bachmann’, from the University of Melbourne. She compiled the author page for the writer Linda Lê on the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing website, where an interview in French she conducted with Lê in 2010 is also available.
Laura Lazzari is a researcher in the fields of Motherhood Studies and the Medical Humanities. She is a Scientific Collaborator at the Sasso Corbaro Foundation for the Medical Humanities (Switzerland) and a Professorial Lecturer at George Washington University (USA). Dr Lazzari holds an MA and a PhD from the University of Lausanne, a MSt in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford, and an MA in Teaching from SUPSI (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland). She has taught at the Universities of Lausanne, Fribourg, and Franklin in Switzerland, and at the George Washington University and the Catholic University of America in the USA. She was the 2015-2016 recipient of the AAUW (American Association of University Women) International Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Italian at Georgetown University. Lazzari is an affiliate member of the ‘Motherhood Project’ at Maynooth University and her current research revolves around representations of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum in contemporary Western cultures and societies. In the last few years, she has worked extensively on motherhood and has taught courses, written articles, and organised interdisciplinary conferences related to this topic. Her publications include a monograph on Lucrezia Marinella (Insula, 2010), a special issue titled To Be or Not to Be a Mother: Choice, Refusal, Reluctance and Conflict. Motherhood and Female Identity in Italian Literature and Culture (intervalla, 2016.1), the volume Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and the Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
Evelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand obtained her PhD in French Literature from the University of Montreal in 2010. Her research interests include contemporary French and Quebecois literature, women’s writing, kinship, community, the legacy of feminism, dialogue between psychoanalysis and gender studies, and the transmission of traumatic memory. Her current research project focuses on representation of Holocaust memory by authors of the second and third generation. She is the author of an essay entitled 'Imaginaires de la filiation: Héritage et mélancolie dans la littérature contemporaine des femmes' (Montreal: Éditions XYZ, 2013) and a monograph on Annie Ernaux, De l’écriture de soi au don de soi: Les pratiques confessionnelles dans La Honte et L’Événement d’Annie Ernaux (Montréal: Cahiers de l’IREF, 2005). She has published articles on women’s writing (Angot, Delaume, Darrieussecq-Laurens ‘plagiarism affair’, Desbiolles, Schneck) and on post-Holocaust literature and cinema (Haenel, Rubinstein, Hesse, des Pallières), and has co-edited the issue of Image & Narrative on ‘Représentations récentes de la Shoah dans les cultures francophones’ (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.
Catriona MacLeod is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris. Her research principally concentrates on the representation of women in French-language graphic novels (bandes dessinées) throughout the 20th century and women’s creation of bandes dessinées in the 21st century, with a further focus on depictions of migration and genocide in this art form. She has previously published articles in journals such as Contemporary French Civilization and L’Esprit créateur and is completing a monograph, Invisible Presence: Drawing Women in French Comics, to be published in 2018 by Intellect.
Maria Teresa Maenza studied at the University of Catania, Italy and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the works of Italian women writers in the 20th century (in particular Aleramo Fallaci, Cerati, Sapienza). She is interested in their narratives of daughterhood and the maternal bond as interpreted through Italian and French feminist theories of sexual difference (Irigaray, Lonzi, Muraro, Cavarero). She also takes into consideration the Jakobsian perspective of literary studies, that is how biography, historical interpretation, rewriting and publication have influenced these authors. Her last essay on Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996) was 'Fuori dall’ordine simbolico della madre: Goliarda Sapienza e Luce Irigaray' (2012) in the volume ‘Quel sogno d’essere’ di Goliarda Sapienza. Percorsi critici su una delle maggiori autrici del Novecento Italiano (ed. Giovanna Providenti). She teaches Italian language and cultural studies at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, where she started the Italian Program and created the Italian minor.
Eliana Maestri is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies and Director of the Centre for Translating Cultures, University of Exeter. Her research focuses on the interplay between translation, mobility, gender, and visual culture. She was the recipient of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award to co-organise the 2019 Exeter Translation Festival and of a 2019 Europe Network Grant (Global Partnerships, Exeter) with the KU Leuven, to study street art. Previous awards include a EUOSSIC Erasmus Mundus Post-Doctoral Fellowship in European Studies, University of Sydney (2011-12), and an MEEUC Research Fellowship at Monash University (2014). Together with colleagues from the KU Leuven and IUAV University of Venice, Maestri is one of the core faculty members of the 2023 Venice International University Summer School 'Linguistic Landscapes: Using Signs and Symbols to Translate Cities'. She is the project lead of 'Filming Migration to Devon', supported by a grant from the 2022-23 Exeter Alumni Annual Fund. Together with Eleonora Federici and Giulia Giorgi, she is co-editing a special issue of Lingue e Linguaggi on 'Translation and Activism' following the success of their international conference at Ferrara University in 2022. Maestri has published on interpretations of Europe among migrants in Australia, on translations of mobile traditions into Italian Australian folk music (with Rita Wilson), on street art in anti-Mafia contexts (with Inge Lanslots and Paul Sambre), and on translations of languages and cityscapes into the visual arts, paying particular attention to prominent artist Jon Cattapan. Her monograph Translating the Female Self across Cultures appeared in the 2018 John Benjamins Translation Library.
Ana Martins took up a lectureship in Portuguese at the University of Exeter in September 2013. She is interested in Portuguese feminism and Lusophone postcolonial and cultural studies. Her research has explored patterns of reading Portugal's relationship with Lusophone Africa (Magic Stones and Flying Snakes: Gender and the Postcolonial Exotic in the work of Paulina Chiziane and Lídia Jorge [Oxford: Peter Lang 2012]), as well as dominant French and Anglo-American theoretical centres of feminist thought ('Lesbian Vertigo: Living the Women's Liberation Movement on the Edge of Europe', in The Women’s Liberation Movement: Impacts and Outcomes, edited by Kristina Schulz, forthcoming 2014). She is currently working on the international reception of Novas Cartas Portuguesas (1972), and on representations of Africa in Brazil. After submitting her PhD thesis in November 2009 (University of Manchester), she took up a teaching appointment at the University of Cambridge, and a Bye-Fellowship (senior academic member) at Queens’ College, Cambridge. In October 2012 she was awarded a Visiting Scholarship in Portuguese Studies in October by the Charles Boxer Chair and the Camões Centre at King's College London, where she taught during 2012-13.
Maria Cristina Mauceri, Cassamarca Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies of the University of Sydney until June 2015, is now Honorary Associate in the same Department. Her research interests include transnational literature in Italy and the representation of alterity in contemporary Italian literature. She published several essays and collaborated to Nuovo Planetario Italiao. Geografia e antologia della letteratura della migrazione in Italia e in Europa (ed. by Antonio Gnisci, 2006). In 2007 she published Nuovo Immaginario Italiano. Italiani e stranieri a confronto nella letteratura italiana contemporanea with M. Grazia Negro, Istanbul University (Rome: Sinnos) and in 2015 Nuovo Scenario Italiano. Stranieri e italiani nel teatro italiano contemporaneo with Marta Niccolai, University College London (Rome: Ensemble).
Pilar Nieva-de la Paz is a Researcher at the Center for Human and Social Sciences (Spanish National Research Council) and Vice-President of the Academic Network ‘Red Transversal de Estudios de Género en Ciencias Humanas, Sociales y Jurídicas. GENET’. Author of more than 50 essays on gender and contemporary literature, in the last five years she has published titles including Imágenes femeninas en la lieratura y las artes escénicas: siglos XX y XXI (Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2012; co-edited with Francisca Vilches-de Frutos); Roles de género y cambio social en la Literatura Española del siglo XX (Rodopi, 2009); Mujer, literatura y esfera pública: España 1900-1940 (Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2008; co-edited with Sarah Wright, Catherine Davies and Francisca Vilches-de Frutos), and many articles on contemporary Spanish women’s writing and feminine identity in the Spanish contemporary literary canon. She is also editor of Annals of Contemporary Spanish Literature (ISI review: University of Temple, Philadelphia).
Gabrielle Parker is Emeritus Professor, formerly Dean of the School of Arts and Pro Vice-Chancellor at Middlesex University, London. She is a long-standing member of editorial board MCF Journal and a founding member of the Centre for Quebec and French-Canadian Studies (CQFCS) at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London (2012). Her work includes interrogating evolutions and continuities in the notion of ‘littérature francophone’, as well as literary works by new Francophone Canadian writers. She has written chapters and articles on Dany Laferrière, Aki Shimazaki, and particularly Ying Chen. Her most recent publications include ‘From “Écrivains coloniaux” to Écrivains de “langue française”: Strata of Un/acknowledged Memories’ in France's Colonial Legacies: Memory, Identity and Narrative ed. by Fiona Barclay (University of Wales Press, 2013). She guest-edited the International Journal of Francophone Studies Volume 16.3 (2013) ‘Asian Francophonie(s): Contemporary Critical Perspectives’ and contributed two articles: ‘Francophonie(s) asiatique(s) contemporaine(s): Perspectives critiques’ and ‘Poétique de la distance: deux approches contrastées, Ying Chen et Aki Shimazaki’. She has published in French and in English, in Quebec, France, the Netherlands and the UK, and is currently working on Ying Chen in the context of ‘Polyphonies franco-chinoises’, a project led in partnership by research centres in the universities of Nantes, Angers and Cergy-Pontoise.
Xon de Ros is Lecturer in Modern Spanish Literature at the University of Oxford, Tutor and Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall and Lecturer at Somerville College, Oxford. Her areas of research are Spanish modernism, with a particular interest in the interrelations between literature and the visual arts, and also poetry. Recent publications include A Companion to Spanish Women Studies, edited with Geraldine Hazbun (Tamesis/Boydel and Brewer, 2011); Primitivismo y Modernismo: El Legado de María Blanchard (Lang, 2007); Words in Action, co-edited with F. Bonaddio, special issue of Bulletin of Spanish Studies. Vol lxxxiii (January 2006); and Crossing Fields in Modern Spanish Culture (Legenda, 2003, co-edited with Federico Bonaddio). She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies CILAVS (Birkbeck College, University of London) and of the Editorial Board of the Revista de Estética y Teoría de las Artes of the University of Seville, and of the International Gender Studies Centre. She was a joint organizer of the Xth Anniversary Conference of Women in Spanish and Portuguese Studies (WISPS) held at LMH in October 2009.
Aureliana Di Rollo has recently completed her PhD at Monash University (Melbourne) with a thesis on the representation of mother-daughter relationships in contemporary Italian women writers. Her background is in Classical studies, literary criticism, linguistics and gender studies. Her main fields of interests are: the literary representation of motherhood and of the mother-daughter relationship in Italian women writers, the gendered use of Italian language (sexism, place names) and gender stereotypes in Italian opera. Before moving to Australia, Aureliana worked as a tenured teacher in an Italian Liceo Classico for ten years, teaching Italian, Latin and Ancient Greek. She is author of several book chapters, journal articles and magazine articles in her fields of expertise. Since 2010 she has been teaching Italian at WAAPA (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts) and other Australian Universities.
Gabriella Romani is Professor of Italian at Seton Hall University, NJ, where she also directs the Charles and Joan Alberto Italian Studies Institute. She is the author of Postal Culture: Writing and Reading Letters in Post-Unification Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2013) and has co-edited: (with Antonia Arslan) Writing to Delight: Italian Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (University of Toronto Press, 2006); (with Ann Hallamore Caesar and Jennifer Burns) The Printed Media in fin-de-siècle Italy (Legenda, UK, 2011); (with Jennifer Burns) The Formation of a National Audience: Readers and Spectators in Italy (1750-1890) (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2017); and (with Ursula Fanning, and Katharine Mitchell) Matilde Serao: International Profile, Reception, and Networks (Classiques Garnier, 2021). She has edited and introduced Edith Bruck’s Letter to My Mother (MLA Texts and Translations Series, 2007) and written the afterword for Edith Bruck, Privato (Garzanti, 2010). She is currently working at a new book-project focused on Jewish Italian writers of the post-unification period.
Jessica Rushton is a PhD researcher at the University of Durham. Her work focuses on the 19th-century figure of the rebellious maidservant in French literature and how she is transposed into 20th- and 21st-century French novels and cinema. Her thesis explores the figure in the works of Stendhal, Maupassant, George Sand, Muriel Barbery, Leïla Slimani, and directors such as Lucie Borleteau Céline Sciamma and Chabrol.
Gill Rye is Emeritus Professor and Associate Fellow at The Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London. She is Director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing and directs the AHRC-funded Motherhood in post-1968 European Literature Network. Her research centres on contemporary women’s writing in French and she has convened the Contemporary Women’s Writing in French seminar since 2000. Her main publications include Narratives of Mothering (2009), Reading for Change (2001), Women’s Writing in Contemporary France (co-edited with Michael Worton, 2002), and ‘When familiar meanings dissolve ...’: Essays in French Studies in Memory of Malcolm Bowie (co-edited with Naomi Segal, 2011), plus numerous articles and chapters, and several edited and co-edited journal special issues. Forthcoming are three publications on 21st-century women's writing in French, co-edited with Amaleena Damlé, a special issue of Dalhousie French Studies on the author Marie Darrieussecq, co-edited with Helena Chadderton, and an edited special issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies on writing childhood. With Amaleena Damlé, she is editing Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature (University of Wales Press), and Experiment and Experience: Women's Writing in France 2000-2010 (Peter Lang). She is Director of the AHRC-funded 'Motherhood in post-1968 European Literature' Network, and editor of the book series 'Studies in Contemporary Women's Writing', published by Peter Lang.
Elizabeth Sercombe is a writer, researcher and facilitator whose interdisciplinary work considers questions of human transformation. Her academic research focuses on the work of Pierrette Fleutiaux, and explores, contests and renews philosophical and psychological perspectives on womanhood, and in particular how these shape, limit or enable women’s ongoing inner and outer liberation. Her first work, Strange Adventures, was published by Peter Lang in May 2016. Elizabeth is the Director of evolute, a human transformation consultancy working with global businesses to facilitate productive and enjoyable ways of working and leading. In 2016-17 she spent several months as artist-in-residence at Konstepidemin in Gothenburg, where she was researching and writing a novel.
Monika Shafi is Elias Ahuja Professor of German Literature and Chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware. She has published on 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century German literature, with specific emphasis on women authors. Among her recent articles are: ‘Discourses of Work in Uwe Timm’s Kopfjäger: Bericht aus dem Inneren des Landes’, Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 2012, special issue: Uwe Timm, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler and Stephan Schindler; ‘Of Heimat, Words, and Work: Günter Grass’s Grimms Wörter: Eine Liebeserklärung’, Heimat zwischen Gedächtnis- und Raumdiskursen: Exemplarische Analysen von Literatur und Film, ed. Friederike Eigler and Jens Kugele (de Gruyter, forthcoming); ‘New Concept-New Life: Bodies and Buildings in Katharina Hacker’s novel Die Habenichtse’, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, special issue: ‘Globalization, German Literature, and the New Economy’, ed. David Coury and Sabine von Dirke, XLVII, 4 (September 2011): 344-56; and ‘Günter Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling The Onion)’, The Novel in German since 1990, ed. Stuart Taberner (Cambridge UP, 2011), 270-83. Her most recent book, Housebound: Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fiction, a study on the role of houses in selected post-Wall literature, has just been published by Camden House.
Anne Simon studied at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), and is currently a researcher at the CNRS (Centre de recherche sur les arts et le langage/EHESS, Paris), where she directs the international research programme 'Animots: animaux et animalité dans la littérature de langue française (XXe-XXI siècles)', which was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche Française until 2014. Her areas of research – the living being, the body, animality -– have led her to publish Une bête entre les lignes. Essai de zoopoétique (2021), Proust ou le réel retrouvé (new edn. 2010) and À leur corps défendant: les femmes à l'épreuve du nouvel ordre moral (with C. Détrez, 2006). She is also the editor of 15 other works, including Nomadismes des romancières contemporaines de langue française (2008).
Catherine Smale is Lecturer in German at King’s College London. Her research interests lie primarily in the field of 20th-century and contemporary German literature, with a particular focus on questions of gender and women’s writing. She has published articles on Ruth Klüger’s Holocaust autobiography and on expressionist women’s poetry, and her monograph, Phantom Images: The Figure of the Ghost in the Work of Christa Wolf and Irina Liebmann, is due for publication in 2013 with the MHRA. Her postdoctoral research examines depictions of domestic space in post-war German literature. Focusing on texts written between 1945 and 2010, it examines the relationship between portrayals of the home and gendered constructs of identity in context of the Cold War and its aftermath. She is currently setting up a cross-departmental research cluster at King’s College London on theories and depictions of domesticity, and in 2012 organised an interdisciplinary symposium on ‘The Politics of the Home: Domestic Culture in Post-War Germany and Austria’.
Lizzie Stewart is Senior Lecturer in Modern Languages, Culture and Society at King's College London, having written her doctoral thesis entitled ‘Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration: Mimesis and Mimeticism in the Plays of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu/Günter Senkel’ (2014) at the University of Edinburgh. This thesis looks at theatre and migration in the Federal Republic of Germany between 1986 and the present day, focusing on productions of plays by two playwrights already renowned for their prose-work. It draws on extensive archival and field work to explore the role which these playwrights and productions of their works have played in re-scripting the German stage as Germany adjusts to its status as a country of immigration. Lizzie’s first article ‘Countermemory and the (Turkish-)German Theatrical Archive’ was published in Transit 8.2 (2013). A further article will appear in the 2014 volume of Türkisch-deutsche Studien. Lizzie has taught German language and literature at the University of Edinburgh since 2011, where she is now a Research Fellow.
Sonja Stojanovic is Assistant Professor of French and concurrent faculty in the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Her book, Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory, History, and the Contemporary through Fiction in French, was published by Liverpool University Press in February 2023. She also has a longstanding interest in contemporary women’s writing and is working on another project which investigates the gendered representations of precarious workers in contemporary French fiction.
Katherine Stone is an Associate Professor in German Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on the intersections between gender, memory, and contemporary German culture, with a focus on discourses surrounding motherhood and sexual violence. Her first monograph Women and National Socialism in Postwar German Literature: Gender, Memory, and Subjectivity explored the ongoing cultural reluctance to acknowledge the full extent of women’s complicity in the Third Reich.
Adina Stroia is Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at Newcastle University. She completed her PhD at the University of Kent, and holds a BA in French and an MA in French and Comparative Literature from the same university. Her PhD, supported by the AHRC, explored the narratives of loss and mourning in contemporary French women’s writing by examining the works of Marie Nimier, Camille Laurens and Annie Ernaux, and investigated the absences found at the centre of their texts and analyse the privileged relationship between trauma, autofiction and women’s writing.
Serena Todesco holds an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of Limerick (2008) and a PhD in Italian Literature from University College Cork (2013). She is a literary translator and an independent scholar of Italian literature and gender studies. Her research interests include female identity and (self) subjectification in relation to gendered and/or cultural otherness in the South and the relationships between philosophies of sexual difference, motherhood, and women’s literature in contemporary Italy. She regularly participates in international conferences and has held seminars on Italian Southern women writers at several universities. She is the author of Tracce a margine. Scritture a firma femminile nella narrazione storica siciliana contemporanea (Pungitopo, 2017) on the memory of women in literature in the work of Sicilian women writers of the 1990s and the 2000s and of Campo a due. Dialogo con Maria Rosa Cutrufelli (Giulio Perrone Editore, 2021), a conversation with feminist activist and author Maria Rosa Cutrufelli on women’s writing, feminism, and gender culture in Italy. She has co-edited two online volumes: (with Daniela Bombara and Milagro Martín-Clavijo) La Sicilia a firma femminile: uno sguardo diacronico e sincronico dal XV al XXI secolo (Rivista di Studi Italiani, 1, 2020) and (with Daniela Bombara) Fantastika! Terrore, soprannaturale, fantascienza, utopia e distopia a firma femminile (ISSA, University of South Africa,1, June 2021). She has published several articles and book chapters on gendered thematisations of the South and motherhood and daughterhood in Elena Ferrante, Michela Murgia, Anna Maria Ortese, Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Nadia Terranova, Maria Attanasio, Giuliana Saladino, Maria Occhipinti, Viola Di Grado, and Slavenka Drakulić.
Jeanine Tuschling received her doctorate from the University of Warwick in 2011. She studied in Bremen, Paris and Frankfurt before coming to England pursue doctoral studies. She holds the degree of Magistra Artium in German Studies and Cultural Studies from the University of Bremen (Germany) and is currently re-working her thesis, 'Reflexions upon Engaged Authorship in Elfriede Jelinek’s Series of the Deadly Sins', for publication. Her general research interests are: the theory and social history of literary authorship; contemporary women’s writing, especially since the 1990s; authors and literature on the internet; literature and media: hypertext theory, digitalisation and media shifts. She is responsible for content on the German pages of the CCWW website.
Rebecca Walker completed her doctorate in Italian Studies at the University of St Andrews, where she is now a Research Associate. Her doctoral research was funded by the Carnegie Trust, and discusses the theme of fracture as a narrative device for representing female subjectivities in Italian women writers Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante. In the past she has also worked on Elsa Morante and Jhumpa Lahiri, and her broader interests include feminist criticism, identity studies, and women’s life-writing.
Godela Weiss-Sussex is Professor of Modern German Literature at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of London. Her main research interests lie in the culture and literature of the 20th and 21st centuries in the following areas: women’s writing, the works of German-Jewish writers produced in Germany and in exile; modernism, the city in literature and the visual arts; biology and literature. Her main current research projects focus on German-Jewish women’s writing in the 20th and 21st centuries as ‘minor literature’; metropolitan consumer culture and the literary imagination; translingual writing. Her recent publications include the monograph Jüdin und Moderne. Literarisierungen der Lebenswelt deutsch-jüdischer Autorinnen in Berlin, 1900-1918 [The Jewish Woman and Modernity. Literary reflections on Jewishness, femininity and urban life by female German-Jewish authors in Berlin, 1900-1918] (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), and (co-edited with Ulrike Zitzlsperger): Tales of Commerce and Imagination: Literary and Cinematic Contributions to the Department Store Debate in the Early 20th Century (Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 2015).
Caragh Wells is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Spanish literature, particularly the period of Franco's dictatorship. She has published widely on post-war Spanish writers and has recently published a monograph on the novels of Carmen Laforet: The Novels of Carmen Laforet. An Aesthetics of Relief (2019). She has an ongoing interest in women’s writing, gender, film studies and European fiction. In 2010 she co-edited Digressions in European Literature: From Cervantes to Sebald. Her current project focuses on cultural representations of the impact of Francoism on male psychology.
Claire Williams lectures in Lusophone Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford, where she is a Fellow of St Peter’s College. Her research and publications focus on women’s writing and minority writing from the Lusophone world, particularly Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Maria Gabriela Llansol and Maria Ondina Braga (Portugal), and Lília Momplé (Mozambique). Dr Williams is a past President of WISPS (Women in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) and the General Secretary of ABIL (Association for British and Irish Lusitanists).
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 2015-2016. She is currently developing a comparative project on 21st-century autofiction and, during her fellowship, she will focus particularly on autofiction by women writers.
Sharon Wood is Emeritus Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Leicester, where she teaches Italian and Translation Studies. Publications include Italian Women’s Writing 1860-1994 (Athlone, 1995), the Cambridge History of Women’s Writing in Italy (edited with Letizia Panizza, 2000) and Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante (with Stefania Lucamante, Purdue 2005). A collection of essays on Grazia Deledda (Grazia Deledda: Challenge to Modernity (Market Harborough 2007)) has recently been translated into Italian as Grazia Deledda: una sfida alla modernità (Cagliari, 2012). Translations from Italian include Primo Levi’s L’assimetria e la vita (The Black Hole of Auschwitz); Romana Petri’s Alle Case Venie and La donna delle Azzorre (An Umbrian War and The Flying Island) and Dacia Maraini’s Passi affrettati (Hurried Steps).