Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (CCM)

Dr Jeff Barda is Senior Lecturer in French Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Experimentation and the Lyric in Contemporary French Poetry (2019), the co-editor with Daniel Finch-Race of Textures: Processus et événements dans la création poétique moderne et contemporaine (2015) and with Philippe Charron of a special volume of essays entitled Pierre Alferi: une pratique monstre (2023). He has recently published articles on Christophe Tarkos, Michèle Métail, Anne-James Chaton, Franck Leibovici, Jacques-Henri Michot, Julien Prévieux, Christophe Hanna and many others; on the relationship between media and contemporary literature, and the history of the avant-gardes. He also co-edited with Eric Lynch a special issue for L’Esprit Créateur (Poetic Practice and the Public, 2022). In October 2021, Dr Barda was awarded the Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize in the category 'Literature in languages other than English' for Experimentation and the Lyric in Contemporary French Poetry (2019). [October 2023-July 2024]

Mary Jane Dempsey is an early career researcher, who has recently completed her PhD in Romance Studies at Cornell University. She was a recipient of the 2021-22 Rome Prize Fellowship in Modern Italian Studies awarded by the American Academy in Rome to conduct archival work to complete her dissertation. Her research has been funded by Cornell’s Institute for European Studies, Society for the Humanities, Institute for Comparative Modernities, Brettschneider Exchange at the University of Oxford, and Trinity College’s Research Grant in Modern Italian History. Before arriving at Cornell, she completed a BA in History and International Studies at The College of New Jersey and a MSc in History of International Relations at the London School of Economics. While at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, she is preparing a book proposal for her monograph, which traces histories of 20th- and 21st-century migration to unpack how gendered memories impact constructions of belonging in the Italian context. She will also continue to study migration narratives by conducting preliminary research for a second project, which will investigate cinematic representations of mobility. [October 2023-July 2024]

Beatrice Falcucci is a researcher and Lecturer at Università dell'Aquila. Her research on Italian colonialism, colonial culture, and its legacy in the building of the Italian character has been supported by several academic institutions including the American Academy in Rome, Fondazione Einaudi in Turin, and The Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. She was awarded the Fondazione Spadolini Prize for the best doctoral thesis on Italian Modern History and the Association for the Study of Modern Italy prize for the best unpublished article in 2021. [February-June 2024]

Michele Maiolani recently obtained his PhD in Italian at the University of Cambridge, where he investigated the relationship between anthropology and literature in the novels of Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, and Gianni Celati. He is currently a Postdoctoral Affiliate at the MMLL Department of the University of Cambridge. He has written extensively on the Italian post-war novel, publishing several articles and book chapters on authors like Primo Levi, Calvino, Sciascia, Bianciardi, Camilleri, and Fo. As Visiting Fellow at Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory he will work on a project entitled 'Postcolonial Holocausts? Indigenous Cultural and Ecological Extinctions in Primo Levi’s Work', which aims to investigate Primo Levi's fictional short stories representing non-Western indigenous cultures from the joint perspectives of Postcolonial Studies, Holocaust Studies and Ecocriticism. [October 2023-March 2024]

Mario Badagliacca studied international relations and politics at the University 'L'Orientale' in Naples and photo-reportage and photojournalism in Rome. Alongside his photographic activity, he has collaborated with non-profit organisations and NGOs involved in humanitarian programmes. His work documents migration, life on the borders, human rights violations, and social issues, and has been exhibited in international venues, including the Hopkins Hall Gallery in the USA. He has worked with international research and academic institutions such as New York University, Oxford University, St Andrews University and San Diego State University. Badagliacca has been the recipient of several international awards, including the Documentary Photography Audience Engagement Grant (2014) for his project Letters from the CIE, and the 2017 ACEP Projecto Media exhibited at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. His book Italy is Out, co-edited with Derek Duncan, is the result of the research conducted as an artist-in-residence for the Transnationalizing Modern Languages(Opens in new window) project  sponsored by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. The volume focuses on the Italian diasporic communities in Addis Ababa, London, New York, Buenos Aires and Tunis. Currently he is a PhD candidate in Culture Sciences at the University of Palermo, Italy. His doctoral project investigates the role digital and visual media play in Italian diaspora networks. [April-July 2023]

Galadriel Ravelli is Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Bath, where she teaches Italian and European history, politics and culture. After studying at the University of Pisa, she completed a PhD at the University of Bath exploring the transnational trajectories of Italian neo-fascism during the Cold War, and drawing on legal materials and interviews to former militants. Her current project looks at the legacy of colonialism in Italy, with a focus on remembrance of colonial deportations from Libya to Italy. [August 2022-July 2023]

Elizabeth Ward is a film historian specialising in German cinema. Her research specialisms include East German cinema, Cold War German cinema and contemporary historical film. Her monograph, East German Cinema and the Holocaust was published in 2021 and examines how East German filmmakers approached Jewish persecution in a country where memories of National Socialist persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political. As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Elizabeth will be developing her next project which examines the role of film festivals as sites for German cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. Alongside her research and teaching interests, Elizabeth is also closely involved in developing inclusive practice at universities, as well as promoting German cinema through events and collaborations with museums, cinemas and public organisations. She is a steering committee member of the German Screen Studies Network and a member of the Women in German Studies' Inclusivity and Diversity Sub-committee. [October 2022-March 2023]

Galadriel Ravelli is Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Bath, where she teaches Italian and European history, politics and culture. After studying at the University of Pisa, she completed a PhD at the University of Bath exploring the transnational trajectories of Italian neo-fascism during the Cold War, and drawing on legal materials and interviews to former militants. Her current project looks at the legacy of colonialism in Italy, with a focus on remembrance of colonial deportations from Libya to Italy. [November 2021-March 2022] 

Elizabeth Ward is a film historian specialising in German cinema. Her research specialisms include East German cinema, Cold War German cinema and contemporary historical film. Her monograph, East German Cinema and the Holocaust was published in 2021 and examines how East German filmmakers approached Jewish persecution in a country where memories of National Socialist persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political. As a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Elizabeth will be developing her next project which examines the role of film festivals as sites for German cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. Alongside her research and teaching interests, Elizabeth is also closely involved in developing inclusive practice at universities, as well as promoting German cinema through events and collaborations with museums, cinemas and public organisations. She is a steering committee member of the German Screen Studies Network and a member of the Women in German Studies' Inclusivity and Diversity subcommittee. [September 2021-June 2022) 

Guido Bartolini is an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork (UCC) where he works on the cultural memory of Fascism in Italian literature and cinema. After studying at the University of Florence and the University of Oxford, he completed an AHRC-funded doctorate at Royal Holloway University of London, on Italian cultural memory of World War II. He is the author of The Italian Literature of the Axis War: Memories of Self-Absolution and the Quest for Responsibility (2021). Dr Bartolini is the ERC representative for The Society for Italian Studies (SIS). As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory he curates the interdisciplinary seminar series ‘Mediated Memories of Responsibility’. [November 2020 - May 2021]

Sara Delmedico received her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Cambridge. She has been MHRA Research Fellow at the Department of Italian (University of Cambridge), Luisa Selis Visiting Fellow at the Institute, and awardee at the British School at Rome. She is also the recipient of two Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation grants. Her publications include ‘Da madri a cittadine. Le donne italiane dall’Unità alla Repubblica’, Da madri a cittadine. Le donne italiane dall’Unità alla Repubblica, a special issue of The Italianist, 38.3 (2018), co-edited with Manuela Di Franco and Helena Sanson, and ‘I Forgive my Sons for any Disgust They Might Have Caused Me’. Alvise I Mocenigo and the Decline of Paternal Authority in Nineteenth-Century Venice’ (Journal of Family History, 2019). Her monograph Opposing Patriarchy. Women and the Law in Action in Pre-Unification Italy (1815-1865) was published in the Institute's 'imlr books' series (2021). Her research interests cover women’s history with a particular focus on the law and the Italian peninsula. Sara is editor-in-chief of the history journal Chronica Mundi(Ope. [October 2020-June 2021]

Patrizia Sambuco’s main areas of research are modern and contemporary Italian culture. Her interests focus on women’s writing, memory study, food and emotion studies. She is the author of Corporeal Bonds: the Daughter-Mother Relationship in 20th-Century Italian Women’s Writing (2012) published in Italian as Corpi e linguaggi (2014), as well as editor of Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas and Nostalgia in Post-Wold War II Italian Culture (2018) and Italian Women Writers 1800-2000 (2015). She held teaching positions at the University of Bristol and the University of St Andrews and was Cassamarca Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at Monash University. As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Dr Sambuco is working on a project on food discourses and alimentary imagination in the cultural history and memory of Italian women. Her project comprises the completion of a monograph, three articles of comparative nature, two public engagement events, and two international conferences. She is currently co-organising The Diasporic Plate: Food in the Contemporary Diasporic World in Times of Crisis, which stems from her research on the last chapter of her monograph. [September-December 2020]

Elizabeth Ward is a film historian specialising in German cinema. Her research specialisms include East German cinema, Cold War German cinema and contemporary historical film. Her monograph, East German Cinema and the Holocaust was published in 2021 and examines how East German filmmakers approached Jewish persecution in a country where memories of National Socialist persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political. As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Elizabeth is developing her next project which examines the role of film festivals as sites for German cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. She will also be developing three further articles related to her research interests in East German and contemporary historical films, namely a chapter on Jutta Wachowiak’s film roles in 1980s East German cinema which will appear in an edited volume examining German Stars, an article on the GDR’s forgotten television star Agnes Kraus, which will be published in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, as well as a chapter on the hit television series Deutschland 83, 86 and 89 which will appear in an edited volume exploring the transculturation of German cultural and intellectual history in contemporary cinema and television. Alongside her research and teaching interests, Elizabeth is also closely involved in developing inclusive practice at universities, as well as promoting German cinema through events and collaborations with museums, cinemas and public organisations. [Nov 2020-June 2021]

Konstantin Zamyatin is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. His current research interests are ethnic politics and language politics in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. He is completing a monograph tentatively entitled Language Policies in the Finno-Ugric Republics of Post-Soviet Russia: Revisiting Revivalism. [September 2020-June 2021]

Linde Koster-Luijnenburg is an OWRI Fellow in Languages and Communities, attached to the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. She received her PhD at the University of Warwick; her dissertation explores representations of the ‘Black Other’ in the commedia all’italiana, central figure in four nationally celebrated Italian comedic films between 1952 and 1968. This cinematographic Black Other gains in agency over this period, coming to dominate iconic ‘Italian’ public spaces inside film plots, and from a meta-perspective, taking over a dominant position in some of the most critically acclaimed cinematographic productions now belonging to what we could describe as the ‘Italian cultural archive’. Luijnenburg is also a filmmaker: while at the Institute her project focuses on linguistic, sonic, visual, and material information communicating imaginaries of identities in the Somali diasporic communities in Birmingham and London relating to 'italianità' (awkwardly translated with ‘Italianness’) by combining classical sociolinguistic and ethnographic analyses and approaches with postcolonial theory, critical race studies, and her practical and theoretical specialty, the ‘unimedial language’ (Moncao, 2009) of the cinematic gaze. She will produce a short film/documentary/performance or hybrid video, in which discussions (in Italian) with Somali diasporic individuals will provide insight into their associations with the Italian language and culture. Luijnenburg has published articles on Italian racial identities in film, Somali-Dutch literature, and Italian literature. She is currently working on an article on her documentary project, 'Africa is You', on the Somali-Dutch diasporic community in Birmingham. [September-November 2019].

Patrizia Sambuco’s main areas of research are modern and contemporary Italian culture. Her interests focus on women’s writing, travel writing, food and emotion studies. She is the author of Corporeal Bonds: the Daughter-Mother Relationship in 20th-Century Italian Women’s Writing (2012) published in Italian as Corpi e linguaggi (2014), as well as editor of Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas and Nostalgia in Post-Wold War II Italian Culture (2018) and Italian Women Writers 1800-2000 (2015). She has held teaching positions at the University of Bristol and the University of St Andrews, and was Cassamarca Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at Monash University. As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Dr Sambuco will be working on a monograph and on a stand-alone journal article focused on food discourses and alimentary imagination in Italian culture. Looking at the interaction of political discourses and personal emotions emerging from autobiographical writing, memoirs, and fiction, her project investigates how taste and alimentary imagination are used to narrate emotions and memories significant for women’s history and subjectivities. [September 2019-June 2020]

Tamara Colacicco received her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading. Entitled Strade e volti della propaganda estera fascista: la diffusione dell’italiano in Gran Bretagna, 1921-40, her dissertation focuses on the history of Italian Studies in Britain during the interwar period. Through an investigation of previously unexplored archival sources from the Archive of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the London National Archives, this research identifies and examines the use of Italian language and culture in British universities such as UCL, Oxford, Liverpool and Manchester as a tool of Fascist propaganda abroad. Colacicco has published several articles on this topic in journals such as the Italianist (2015) and California Italian Studies (2016). She also developed her doctoral research themes into a monograph entitled La propaganda fascista nelle università inglesi: la diplomazia culturale di Mussolini in Gran Bretagna (2017). In 2016-17 Colacicco was a member of the British School at Rome and an award-holder at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. She has researched Anglo-Italian cultural and political relations during the interwar period by looking at the use of English language and culture in Fascist Italy as an instrument of pro-British propaganda among Italians. In so doing, she has systematically compiled the history of the British Institute of Florence and the British Council, published in Modern Italy and entitled ‘The British Institutes and the British Council in Fascist Italy: from Harold Goad to Ian Greenlees, 1917-40’. In connection with the exploration of the history of the Florentine British Institute and the spread of Fascist and anti-Fascist ideologies among British intellectual circles, Colacicco has been awarded a prize by the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, dedicated to her late supervisor, Professor Duggan (1957-2015);  this research accepted for publication in 2018 by Contemporanea (Il Mulino). She also has research interests in Cultural Studies and the History of the Church and Catholicism including the investigation of organised crime in Southern Italy, particularly the Camorra, its cultural representations through literature and cinema and its ambiguous relations with religion and the Church. In this connection Colacicco was awarded a grant by the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) to present the results of her research at the University of Sydney in 2015 and has published a book chapter entitled ‘Il clero Campano tra collaborazione e lotta alla camorra’ for the volume L’immaginario devoto tra mafia e antimafia: riti, culti, santi (2017). She has also cooperated with the Università di Roma Torvergata for an in-progress official website on the Italian mafia and the Church. She has given papers at several major conferences, including ASMI, ACIS and the Society for Italian Studies. At the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Colacicco will explore the ‘political memories’ of leading British pro-Italian personalities based in London and Florence and multidimensional aspects of transnational Fascism, particularly the links and exchanges between Italian and British fascists, with an emphasis on the impact of Catholicism and Italian economic theories in developing Fascist doctrine outside Italy. Among other outcomes, this research will also result in a monograph in English for Routledge’s Studies in Fascism and the Far Right entitled Anglo-Italian Transnational Fascism: Harold Goad and the ‘Italian Tradition’, 1919-45. [September 2018-May 2019]

Sara Delmedico received her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Cambridge with a dissertation entitled 'From the Restoration to the Pisanelli Code (1815-1865): A Cultural and Historical Assessment of the Legal Status of Women in the North of the Italian Peninsula'. Her most recent publications include ‘The “Appropriateness” of Dowry: Women and Inheritance in the Papal States in the Early Nineteenth Century’, GLOSSAE. European Journal of Legal History (2016); ‘Alimenti e dote alla periferia dello Stato Pontificio: la famiglia Pucci’ (2017); ‘Da madri a cittadine. Le donne italiane dall’Unità alla Repubblica’, Da madri a cittadine. Le donne italiane dall’Unità alla Repubblica, a special issue of The Italianist (2018) co-edited with Manuela Di Franco and Helena Sanson. Her research interests cover women’s history with a particular focus on the law and the Italian peninsula. She is editor-in-chief of the history journal Chronica Mundi ens in new wind. During her tenure of the Luisa Selis Visiting Fellowship, she will be working on a project entitled ‘Being a Woman in 19th-Century Sardinia. Love, Seduction and Reputation in the Law in Action’. [April-June 2019]

Patrizia Sambuco’s main areas of research are modern and contemporary Italian culture. Her interests focus on women’s writing, travel writing, food and emotion studies. She is the author of Corporeal Bonds: the Daughter-Mother Relationship in 20th-Century Italian Women’s Writing (2012) published in Italian as Corpi e linguaggi (2014), as well as editor of Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas and Nostalgia in Post-Wold War II Italian Culture (2018) and Italian Women Writers 1800-2000 (2015). She has held teaching positions at the University of Bristol and the University of St Andrews and was Cassamarca Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at Monash University, Australia. As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Dr Sambuco will be working on a monograph and a stand-alone journal article focused on food discourses and alimentary imagination in Italian culture. Looking at the interaction of political discourses and personal emotions emerging from autobiographical writing, memoirs, and fiction, her project investigates how taste and alimentary imagination are used to narrate emotions and memories significant for women’s history and subjectivities. [September 2018-June 2019]

Fiona Sampson has published in more than 35 languages and has received the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia), the Charles Angoff Award (US), the 2016 Slovo Podgrmec Prize, the 2015 Povelji za međunarodnu saradnju Award (Bosnia), the Aark Arts International Poetry Prize (India), and has been shortlisted for the Evelyn Encelot Prize for European Women Poets. She received an MBE for services to literature in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours, 2017. From 2005 to 2012 she was Editor of Poetry Review; she is now Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton, where she is Director of the Roehampton Poetry Centre. She is a Fellow and former Council Member of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the English Association, the Higher Education Association and the Wordsworth Trust, and Patron of the Anglo-Russian Cultural Institute and of Living Words. Her publications include 29 volumes of poetry, literary non-fiction and criticism; she has also co-translated 4 volumes of poetry and developed an editorial specialism in contemporary poetry in translation. She has received the Newdigate Prize, the Cholmondeley Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, Kathleen Blundell and Oppenheimer-John Downes Awards from the Society of Authors, a number of Writer’s Awards from both the English and the Welsh Arts Councils, and various Poetry Book Society commendations, and has been shortlisted twice for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. A prolific broadcaster and critic, she has held a number of international writing fellowships, and serves regularly on international juries. Earlier, she pioneered writing in health care in the UK, and directed an international poetry festival in Wales for 5 years before becoming Director of the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust for literary translation. She has also published a critically acclaimed biography, In Search of Mary Shelley. Her study of musical form in poetry, Lyric Cousins, and her collection The Catch both appeared in 2016. She is currently completing work on an AHRC-funded research project looking at poet to poet trio translation, and writing a libretto for the composer Philip Grange as part of the AHRC-funded OWRI initiative. [September 2018-June 2019]

Tamara Colacicco received her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading. Entitled Strade e volti della propaganda estera fascista: la diffusione dell’italiano in Gran Bretagna, 1921-40, her dissertation focuses on the history of Italian Studies in Britain during the interwar period. Through an investigation of previously unexplored archival sources from the Archive of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the London National Archives, this research identifies and examines the use of Italian language and culture in British universities such as UCL, Oxford, Liverpool and Manchester as a tool of Fascist propaganda abroad. Colacicco has published several articles on this topic in  journals such as the Italianist (2015) and California Italian Studies (2016). She also developed her doctoral research themes into a monograph entitled La propaganda fascista nelle università inglesi: la diplomazia culturale di Mussolini in Gran Bretagna (2017). In 2016-17 Colacicco was a member of the British School at Rome and an award-holder at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. She has researched Anglo-Italian cultural and political relations during the interwar period by looking at the use of English language and culture in Fascist Italy as an instrument of pro-British propaganda among Italians. In so doing, she has systematically compiled the history of the British Institute of Florence and the British Council, published as ‘The British Institutes and the British Council in Fascist Italy: from Harold Goad to Ian Greenlees, 1917-40’. In connection with the exploration of the history of the Florentine British Institute and the spread of Fascist and anti-Fascist ideologies among British intellectual circles, Colacicco has been awarded a prize by the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, dedicated to her late supervisor, Professor Duggan (1957-2015);  this research will lead to an article accepted for publication in 2018 by Contemporanea. Apart from specialising in Modern Italian History with a specific focus on Anglo-Italian history, Memory, Intellectual History and Cultural History, she has research interests in Cultural Studies and the History of the Church and Catholicism including the investigation of organised crime in Southern Italy, particularly the Camorra, its cultural representations through literature and cinema and its ambiguous relations with religion and the Church. In connection with this research Colacicco was awarded a grant by the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) to present the results of her research at the University of Sydney in 2015 and has published a book chapter entitled ‘Il clero Campano tra collaborazione e lotta alla camorra’ in L’immaginario devoto tra mafia e antimafia: riti, culti, santi (2017). She has also cooperated with the Università di Roma Torvergata for a website on the Italian mafia and the Church. She has given papers at several major conferences, including ASMI, ACIS and the Society for Italian Studies. At the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Colacicco will explore the ‘political memories’ of leading British pro-Italian personalities based in London and Florence and multidimensional aspects of transnational Fascism, particularly the links and exchanges between Italian and British fascists, with an emphasis on the impact of Catholicism and Italian economic theories in developing Fascist doctrine outside Italy. This research will also result in a monograph in English for Routledge’s Studies in Fascism and the Far Right entitled Anglo-Italian Transnational Fascism: Harold Goad and the ‘Italian Tradition’, 1919-45. [November 2017-June 2018]

Dr Marcas MacCoinnigh is Lecturer in Irish and Celtic Studies at Queen’s University Belfast (2007–). He has also held positions as Senior Fulbright Irish Language Scholar in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame (2010-11), IRCHSS Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Modern Irish, University College Cork (2006-7) and Vera Furness Research Fellow at the University of Ulster (2003-2006). His principal research interests lie in the fields of Irish Phraseology and Lexicography, Folkloristics and Cultural Memory. He has published in journals including the Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, Folklore, Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship and the International Journal of Lexicography. As Visiting Fellow, he will pursue research on the Cultural Memory of the Irish Language within Ulster Unionism-Loyalism [February–June 2018].

Sebastian Raj Pender received his doctorate in History from the University of Cambridge, and holds degrees from Aberystwyth University and the University of Oxford in International Relations and Contemporary South Asia respectively. His research focuses on practices of commemoration conducted in colonial and postcolonial settings and, as Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, he will continue his work on the memorialisation of the so-called Indian 'Mutiny' of 1857. Focusing on the (re)construction of physical sites of memory, as well as commemoration ceremonies conducted to mark anniversaries of the colonial conflict, this study interrogates the different ways in which the controversial events of 1857 have been memorialised over the course of 150 years. In so doing, this study contends that it is possible to identify a succession of distinct phases in which commemoration responded to contemporary concerns by shaping the events of 1857 from the perspective of the present. By charting shifts in what it has meant to remember 1857, this study demonstrates the extent to which memory is an inherently contingent process, rooted within the broader socio-political terrain which gives the past its meaning at a given historical moment. Specifically, it shows the extent to which the events of 1857 have always been in a state of becoming as the past is negotiated by successive generations within the ever-changing present. [September 2017-June 2018]

Will Visconti completed a joint PhD in French Studies and Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on the visual and performing arts, transgression, gender and sexuality. He is particularly interested in late 19th-century Paris, early 20th-century art and performance, and the interplay of the past and present across fields including art, fashion, cabaret and burlesque. Visconti's current projects include a biographical study of the performer La Goulue (born Louise Weber), and an exploration of the life and legacy of the Marchesa Luisa Casati. [September-November 2017]

Aleksandra Budrewicz is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Modern Languages at the Pedagogical University of Kraków, Poland. Her PhD thesis was devoted to 19th-century Polish translations of William Shakespeare. Her research concentrates on comparative literature, the reception of British authors in Poland (in particular William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and William Morris), as well as Polish translations of British and American literature. She has published widely on these topics, and has co-edited a volume devoted to the reception of Victorian writers in Poland. Her monograph entitled Dickens w Polsce. Pierwsze stulecie [Dickens in Poland. First Centenary] (2015) discussed the Polish reception of Dickens between 1839 and 1939. During her stay at the Institute, she will continue her work on literary and cultural reception in conjunction with some of the findings of Cultural Memory. [September- October 2016]

Clara Rachel Eybalin Casséus received her PhD in Political Geography from the University of Poitiers. She also holds a MPA in Strategic Public Policy (from the American University of Paris) and a MA in International Affairs and Sociology (from the Institut Catholique de Paris). Taking memory as a powerful dynamic engine to deconstruct citizenship while connecting beyond borders challenges the two disciplines of geography and political science. Her research interests deal with an interdisciplinary approach to notions of mobility, citizenship and state politics. She regularly participates in academic fora in the Gulf region as well as in the Caribbean. Her publications include articles on transnationalism and South-South cooperation and a book Transnationalisme Associatif Haïtien et Jamaïcain. Géographie du développement local et politiques diasporiques. During her stay at the Institute, Clara Rachel will work on her new monograph, provisionally entitled 'Geopolitics of Memory and Transnational Citizenship. Thinking Local Development in a Global South'. [October 2016-March 2017]

Matthew Mild holds a doctorate from Bangor University and four Dutch interdisciplinary degrees in the field of history. He has lectured in Italian and European history at Bangor University, the Norwegian Institute in Rome, and the University of Salford from 2009 to 2014. His main research interests lie in the body, medicine, and everyday social renewal, in the history of contemporary European writing and acting. He held a Visiting Fellowship at the University of London in 2011, and co-organised three annual seminars for the American Comparative Literature Association in Providence (2012), Toronto (2013), and New York (2014). He co-edited the interdisciplinary history volume Crisis, Rupture and Anxiety (2012), and has published journal articles in the field of contemporary history of fiction and performing arts in European languages. He has worked on medicine and esoteric mystical models in writing and performance in French, German, Italian, Dutch, and English, by Patrick Süskind, Luigi Pirandello, Menno ter Braak, Amélie Nothomb, Marilyn Manson, and Lars von Trier. As research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, he will focus on medical and mythical understandings of sex and race in Turkish European cinema and European migrant literature, from France, Somalia, and from Lebanon to Syria, Italy, and Germany. [September 2016-June 2017]

Ilaria Poerio was awarded her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading in 2015. She has published A scuola di dissenso. Storie di resistenza al confino di polizia (1926-43) (2016); Postcards from Italy. Ventanni di berlusconismo sulla stampa britannica (2013) and co-authored Vento del Sud. Gli antifascisti meridionali nella guerra di Spagna (2007). She is currently co-writing, with Mary Gibson (CUNY), a major essay on European penal colonies from the 19th to the 20th century. Next September/October she will be Visiting Fellow at the Joan and Alberto Italian Studies Institute at Seton Hall University (NJ), which will allow her to explore the cult of San Gennaro in the Italian-American communities of New Jersey and New York State. Having completed a monograph on antifascism and the victims of the repressive system of the regime, Dr Poerio will focus on the legacy of Fascism in the new-born Italian Republic. During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory she will pursue her new research project on the reconversion and rehabilitation of leading Fascist personalities – those who carried out their roles in the administration of justice and in the police and public security system – once the regime had come to an end, examining how this continuity influenced the Italian transition from dictatorship to democracy. [November 2016-June 2017]

Massimo Riva is Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University. Educated at the University of Florence (Laurea in Philosophy, 1981) and at Rutgers University (PhD, 1986), he has held visiting appointments at the University of Sydney, the University of Bologna, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, and the École des Hautes Études, Paris. He has published and lectured widely on a variety of topics and authors from Giovanni Boccaccio to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and from Giambattista Vico to Italo Calvino. He is the author of four monographs: Saturno e le Grazie (1992), Malinconie del Moderno (2001), Il futuro della letteratura (2011) and Pinocchio digitale (2012). He is the editor of Italian Tales. An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction (2004; 2007), and co-editor of Renato Poggioli: An Intellectual Life (2012) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (2012). He also co-edited, with John Davis, a special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies entitled Mediating the Risorgimento (2013). Professor Riva’s pioneering engagement with information technology in both teaching and research over the past twenty years, has led to a number of award-winning projects, such as: 'The Decameron Web' (supported by two consecutive two-year grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1999-2002) and the Brown-University of Bologna 'Pico Project'. In 2004, he and his co-investigators were awarded a two-year NEH grant for the creation of a Virtual Humanities Lab at Brown University. Under Riva's direction, the VHL provides a platform for interdisciplinary projects in the area of Italian Studies (literary studies, history and the history of art). His latest initiative in this area, the 'Garibaldi and the Risorgimento' project, features a digital copy of a 270’ long and 4.5’ wide moving panorama, made in England in 1860-62 to celebrate the life and career of the Italian national hero. An interactive installation of the panorama has been the object of several exhibits at the British library (2010), the Sala del Risorgimento at the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, the Biblioteca Salaborsa, Bologna (2011), and the Italian pavillion at the Congress of the International Council of Museums in Rio de Janeiro (2013). In 2012, he was awarded a ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship. He is currently at work on a book project tentatively entitled ‘Italian Shadows: Casanova’s Polemoscope and Other Tales of Imaginary and Forgotten Media’, a project selected for the Brown Digital Publishing initiative and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. [February 2017]

Alessandro Carlucci(Opens in new window) is a John Fell Fund Postdoctoral Research Assistant in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, where he also teaches Italian linguistics. His research focuses on the spread of English as an international language, especially its effects on Italian culture and the development of the Italian language. Dr Carlucci is also interested in modern political and intellectual history, and in the history of linguistics, and has published widely on the linguistic views that the Italian philosopher and political leader Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) expressed in his writings, as well as on previously neglected aspects of Gramsci’s life. He is the editor of New Approaches to Gramsci: Language, Philosophy and Politics (2012) and the author of Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony(Opens in new window) (2013/2015). [September 2015-June 2016]

Carla Mereu Keating received her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading. She has recently completed an archival research project in Rome and in Los Angeles entitled 'The Language and the Image of a Nation: Diplomatic Relations between the Italian Foreign Office and the MPPDA' with the support of the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. Carla has contributed to several publications on film history, censorship, ethnicity, and audiovisual translation. Her monograph, The Politics of Dubbing: Film Censorship and State Intervention in the Translation of Foreign Cinema was published in 2016. She co-organises Migrating Texts(Opens in new window), a series of interdisciplinary colloquia on subtitling, translation and adaptation hosted by the Institute. Her research at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory deals with portrayals of warfare and war legacy in films, political censorship and the formation of historical memory. [October 2015-June 2016]

Sam Merrill is a postdoctoral researcher in digital sociology at Umeå University, Sweden. His interdisciplinary research practice focuses on questions of memory, landscape, heritage and infrastructure within a broadly conceived underground (spatial, political and cultural). He completed a PhD in cultural geography at University College London in 2014, has a postgraduate degree in Heritage Studies from The Brandenburg Technical University, Germany, and an undergraduate degree in Archaeology and Ancient History from the University of Birmingham. He has also worked at, or been associated with, Architectural Conservation, Tourism, Urban Studies and Modern Languages departments in the UK, Germany and Australia. In 2014 he was awarded first prize in Peter Lang’s Young Scholars in Memory Studies Competition. He has published on a varied array of topics; his monograph, Excavating Buried Memories: Mnemonic Production in the Railways Beneath London and Berlin, appeared in 2017. As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Sam will work on his new project; Mobilising The Past: The Transnational and Digital Social Memories of Contemporary European Antifascism. [September 2015-June 2016]

Máire Ní Annracháin is Professor of Modern Irish at University College Dublin. Her doctoral dissertation was on the Scottish Gaelic poetry of Sorley Maclean. Her work focuses on the literature of two similar but distinct Celtic languages, Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Recent articles have been on the 20th-century poetry of Biddy Jenkinson, Sorley Maclean and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, and on the long and iconic 18th-century poem 'Cúirt and Mheán-Oíche' ('The Midnight Court') by Brian Merriman. Most of her publications are in Irish but a small number are written in English, including 'Affinities in Time and Space: Reading the Gaelic Poetry of Ireland and Scotland' in P. Mackay et al (eds), Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry, (2011). She recently participated in a research project on motherhood in the Institute, and in a project on Irish and Scottish Poetry based in the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. She will work on irony and cultural memory during her stay at the Institute as part of a wider project on figurative language in Gaelic poetry.  [January-February 2016]

Ryan Prout is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Co-Director of Personal and Professional Development at Cardiff University’s School of Modern Languages. His current work is on the visual cultures of Spain and Latin America. Recent publications include ‘Otras competencias: Ethnobotany, the Badianus Codex, and Metaphors of Mexican Memory Loss and Disability in Las buenas hierbas’ in Libre Acceso: Critical Disability Studies in Latin American Literature and Film, edited by Susan Antebi and Beth Jörgensen (2016), and ‘From Boom to Bubble and Bust: Comical Economics in Aleix Saló’s Troika Trilogy (2014). Other publications include ‘Canine Colloquium: Skeuomorphism and the Transitional Dog in La Criatura, Solas, and Recuerdos de perrito de mierda’ (2017). During his Fellowship he will be completing an article on the trivialization of Hitler and Nazism in discourse around secessionist movements in Spain ('Reductio ad Hitlerum: Uses and Abuses of Cultural Memory in the Secessionist Debate in Catalonia'), and working on a monograph focused on Spanish graphic novels and the history of social protest. He is an active trade unionist and contributed to the working group on the TUC’s International LGBT Solidarity Charter (published in March 2015). [April-June 2016]

Francesco Ricatti is Cassamarca Senior Lecturer in History and Italian Studies at the University of the Sunshine Coast and Program Coordinator for the Bachelor of Arts. His research interests are in migration history, critical whiteness studies, political history, the history of emotions, football history, historiography, and creative approaches to history and public memory. He is the author of Embodying Migrants: Italians in Postwar Australia (2011) and co-editor of Politica ed emozioni nella storia d’Italia dal 1848 ad oggi (2012). In 2013 he co-edited a special issue of Cultural Studies Review on emotional geographies of the uncanny. His current research on Italian migration to Australia focuses on emotional geographies, resilience in challenging rural environments, the intersections between migration and colonialism, the colonial roots of Australian multiculturalism, and migrants’ attitudes towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.  [March-May 2016]

John Charles Ryan is Research Fellow in Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. His areas of interest span the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and practice-led research. His books Green Sense (2012), Unbraided Lines (2013), Being With (2014) and Posthuman Plants (2015) have contributed to the new field of critical plant studies. He is also the co-editor of two collections, The Green Thread (2015) and The Language of Plants (2016), with Patrícia Vieira and Monica Gagliano. His FloraCultures archive(Opens in new window) explores plant-based cultural heritage. While at the Institute, John will be further developing ‘botanical memory’ based on interviews he has conducted in the South-West of Western Australia. [March-June 2016]

Eloisa Betti(Opens in new window) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of History, Culture & Civilisation at the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on the intersection between labour history, urban history and women’s history and gender studies. She has written several articles in Italian and in English including 'Women's Working Conditions and Job Precariousness in Historical Perspective' (2010), and 'Bologna in the Cold War' (2015). During her stay at the Centre for Cultural Memory she will develop the project 'Women workers unfairly dismissed in Cold War Bologna. Gendering memories of class conflict in 1950s Italy' based on her book Senza Giusta Causa (014). Her research will provide an in-depth analysis of the memory-building process related to unfair dismissals occurring in Cold War Bologna. She will compare the gender-neutral 'grand narratives' that have developed over the past forty years within the labour movement and trade unions with the gendered counter-narratives emerging from research into unfairly dismissed women workers and their life stories. [November 2014-January 2015]

​Michael Darroch is an Associate Professor of Media Art Histories and Visual Culture at the University of Windsor and Director of the IN/TERMINUS Creative Research Collective. He has published essays on art, media, language, and urban culture and is co-editor of the anthology Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban (2014). Whilst at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, he will be completing a book manuscript on transatlantic and interdisciplinary influences on Canadian media studies and the journal Explorations (1953–1959). [January - May 2015]

Rebecca Dolgoy’s work explores the theory and praxis of Cultural Memory. Her doctoral project, 'Berlin’s Neues Museum: A Case Study in Cultural Memory', examined the changing turn-of-the-century memory landscape in Berlin and sought to contextualize it within larger cultural narratives. Some of the fundamental questions underpinning her work include: What does the way in which we use the past tell us about the present? How can we establish an ethical model of Cultural Memory that emphasizes the appropriation, use, and transformation of cultural heritage? What is the place of the 20th century in longer narratives of history? While establishing the theoretical dimensions of her project, she has presented at conferences and workshops and published on the subject in several journals including Comparative Literature and Culture and Austausch. Complementing this theoretical work, Rebecca is currently developing interpretive and curatorial experiments with the Ashmolean and The Story Museum in Oxford. While at the Institute, she will investigate London’s Imperial War Museum to ascertain how the recent renovations can be contextualized in World War One centenary commemorations as well as with the longer history of the museum itself. [September 2014-June 2015]

Claudia Jünke(Opens in new window) teaches French and Spanish literary and cultural studies at the University of Bonn. Her research interests include French and Spanish literature and culture from the 19th century to the present, narrative, cultural memory, cultural identity and intermediality. Among her publications is a book on the memory of the Spanish Civil War in contemporary Spanish literature and film (Erinnerung – Mythos – Medialität. Die Darstellung des Spanischen Bürgerkriegs im aktuellen Roman und Spielfilm in Spanien (2012). During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory she will be engaged in developing a project entitled 'Entangled Pasts – War, Violence and Cultural Memory in the Contemporary French Novel'. [February-March 2015]

​Angelika Kemper obtained her doctorate at the University of Mannheim and worked as a research fellow in an interdisciplinary research programme at the University of Münster in the area of symbolic communication and social value systems from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. She is currently a post-doctoral assistant for German language and literature of the Middle Ages at the University of Klagenfurt. Her research interests include the art of memory and transfer of knowledge in the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, especially from a comparative and interdisciplinary point of view. Her work at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory will focus on mnemonic literature by conducting basic research into the London manuscript tradition. [January-February 2015]

Claire Launchbury is Lecturer and SPF 03 Fellow in French and Cultural Studies at the School of Humanities and Modern Languages at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. During her Fellowship at the Centre for Cultural Memory, she will be working on documentary practices in contemporary Lebanese audio-visual cultures, part of a monograph project entitled 'Documenting Lebanon'. She completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in French at Leeds (2011-13), specialising in cultural studies approaches to literature, popular music, film and visual cultures from the Francophone Machrek with particular focus on Lebanon. Dr Launchbury initially studied music at Exeter University, then continued her studies at University College Cork before undertaking her doctorate at Royal Holloway, University of London, which was awarded in 2009. Her thesis investigated constructions of French cultural memory at the BBC during the Second World War through broadcasts of music, poetry and political programmes and was published in 2012 as Music, Poetry, Propaganda: Constructing French Cultural Soundscapes at the BBC during the Second World War. She was resident in Paris for several years, worked as a  lectrice at the IUT Ville d'Avray, and taught at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. [December 2014-February 2015]

Pamela V. Sing is Professor at Campus Saint-Jean, the francophone campus of the University of Alberta, where she teaches Franco-Canadian, Québécois, and French literatures. Her research and publications are mainly in the fields of Western Canadian Francophone and Quebec literatures and textual production by Métis of French-Canadian ancestry, the latter including a monograph, co-edited collections of essays, as well as articles and book chapters. Her most recent project seeks to contribute to the body of existing literature and knowledge on cultural memory and graphic narratives through the rediscovery and multidisciplinary study of an unexplored 1940s' French-Canadian loup-garou comic series published in a Jeunesse étudiante catholique newspaper targeting children.The study of intersections between JEC ideology, the loup-garou’s traditionally scary traits and inherently transgressive qualities, and the comics series’ role as a source of entertainment will perforce involve the investigation of the slippery 'borders' between identity and alterity, realism and the marvellous, and ideology and artistic expression. Before her stay at the Institute, she will be working on the series’ 1943 textual source and its apparently uncensored, pre-Grande noirceur 1944 panels, as the 2014-15 recipient of the University of Glasgow’s Stirling Maxwell Fellowship. During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, her research will concentrate on the transformations that the series underwent from 1945 to 1949, and the signification of those transformations in regard to the relationship between identity/alterity, realism/the marvellous, and ideology/imagination. [April - May 2015]

Barbara Spadaro (University of Bristol) is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the AHRC Project Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures. Her work engages with history and memory narratives of transnational communities. She researches memories of subjects from the former Italian and French colonies of North Africa, targeting transformation of ideas of subjectivity, citizenship and Italianness inside and outside of Europe over the 19th and 20th centuries. During her Visiting Fellowship at the Centre for Cultural Memory, Barbara will develop her work on the memories of the Jews from Libya across multiple destinations of their diaspora across Italy, Europe and North America. This strand of her research considers the memories of the Jews from Libya in the wider spectrum of the memory narratives of the Jews from former European colonies in Europe and 'the West', focusing on ideas of Italian domestic culture and citizenship. Barbara’s research questions stem from her background as historian of gender and European imperial cultures. She is the author of articles on history of gender, Italian fascism and colonial relations, and of a monograph analysing ideas of whiteness in the representations and social practices of the Italian bourgeoisie in Italy and Libya (1910s-1930s), Una colonia Italiana. Incontri, memorie e rappresentazioni tra Italia e Libia (2013). [November 2014-January 2015]

Bruno Tribout(Opens in new window) (University of Aberdeen) is an AHRC Early Career Fellow (2014-15) and Visiting Fellow at the Institute’s Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. His research concentrates on the intersections between literature, historiography and political thought in 17th-century France, with a particular focus on the representation of conflicts. His first monograph explored the theory and images of conspiracy in the age of Louis XIV (Les Récits de conjuration sous Louis XIV, 2010). He has co-edited a collection of essays on life writing (Narrating the Self in Early Modern Europe, 2007) and published articles on the historiography of the civil wars known as the Fronde and on the frondeurs and memoir writers Retz and La Rochefoucauld. During his stay at the Institute, he will be working on a book project which looks at the memory of the Fronde and its significance for the representation of absolutism and the development of political criticism in early modern France. [April-May 2015]

Colleen Becker completed her PhD at Columbia University and a MA at New York University. Using the lapse of anti-Socialist legislation in 1890 as a starting point, her doctoral thesis investigated how high art and mass media represented Germans’ challenged and changing national identity as the working classes achieved greater socio-political empowerment. Her master’s thesis examined the disjunction between Nazi social policies towards women and state-subsidized visual arts propaganda. In broad terms, she studies the cultural history of German nationalism. Her published work includes flash fiction, academic articles, journalism, art reviews and essays. She has presented works of fiction at a number of venues including Tate Modern and, most recently, her flash fiction piece ‘What We Made’ served as the basis for the exhibition project ‘Translation Games,’ an investigation of the theory and practice of translation in art and language. Formerly, she was a Teaching Fellow at Columbia University and Barnard College. Her career at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art was followed by an assistant archivist position at the Art Institute of Chicago and assistant archivist and archivist roles at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her article on Aby Warburg, historiography and Germania appeared the Journal of Art Historiography in 2013. [October 2013-June 2014]

Carmen Donia is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory and a member of the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies at the University of Padua. Her PhD project concerns encyclopedism and vernacular Aristotelianism in the XVIth Academies of the Venetian Republic. During her stay at the Institute she will explore the relationship between language and visual memory in the Accademia degli Infiammati (1540-45), focusing on the work by Giuseppe Betussi (1512 - around 1573). She was awarded the Vittore Branca Scholarship at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and carried out research at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. She has published an essay and run conferences on Renaissance Italian studies. [September-December 2013]

Fabiana Loparco is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory and a doctoral student in History of Education at the University of Macerata (CESCO). She is conducting research on the periodical press for children in Italy between the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is the author of a volume about children and war, The Corriere dei Piccoli and World War I, and other articles published in international journals. During her stay at the Institute, she will explore the history of English and Italian children’s periodical press during the late 19th century as an important means in understanding National educational processes. [September 2013]

Yosefa Loshitzky is Professorial Research Associate at the Centre for Media and Film Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. From January to April 2014 she will also be a Visiting Researcher at the United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility based in Barcelona, Spain. She has been a Visiting Research Fellow and Professorial Research Associate at the Annenberg University of Pennsylvania, USA, the Yitzhak Rabin Centre for Israel Studies, the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, the French CNRS, and the Italian CNR.  Until 2002 she was a Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  In 2003-2004 she was Visiting Professor at King’s College London, in 2004-2005 Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at University College London and from 2005 to 2012 Professor of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London. She has given keynote and plenary papers in the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Brazil, Israel and elsewhere. From 1994 to 2003 she served on the editorial board of Cinema Journal, the official organ of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is currently a member on the international advisory board of The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. She is the author of The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (1995), Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (2001, selected by Choice Magazine as an outstanding academic title for 2002), Screening Strangers: Diaspora and Migration in Contemporary European Cinema (2010), the editor of Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on ‘Schindler’s List’ (1997), and a guest editor of a special issue of Third Text on ‘Fortress Europe: Migration, Culture, Representation’ (2006).  She is currently writing a book entitled ‘Just Jews? Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Contemporary Culture and Beyond’. Loshitzky’s work has been translated into French, German, Swedish, Danish, Italian, Arabic and Hebrew. [September 2013-August 2014]

Markus Messling(Opens in new window) is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. He teaches French and Italian literary and cultural studies at Potsdam University and is Head of the research group ‘Philology and Racism in the 19th Century’, funded by an Emmy Noether Excellence Award of the German Research Foundation. He holds a Drphil from the Freie Universität Berlin (2007). His research specialises in the épistémologie of philology, literary theory, the historical anthropology of language and writing, French and Italian Literature in the long 19th century, and the Mediterranean avant-gardes. His doctoral dissertation, published as Pariser Orientlektüren. Zu Wilhelm von Humboldts Theorie der Schrift (2008), was awarded the Tiburtius Prize by the Universities of Berlin. He was Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2011, and is a member of the ‘Working Group Zukunftsphilologie’ at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). He is also heading (with Franck Hofmann) the international research project ‘Transmed! Pensée méditerranéenne et conscience européenne’ (with the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris). Amongst his publications are: Champollions Hieroglyphen. Philologie und Weltaneignung (2012); Maurice Olender: Die Sprachen des Paradieses. Religion, Rassentheorie und Textkultur [Engl.: The Languages of Paradise], ed. and prefaced by Markus Messling (2013); ‘L’archipel des hommes-crocodiles. Modernité, archaïsme et stratégie narrative chez Kossi Efoui’ in: Worldwide. Archipels de la mondialisation, ed. by Ottmar Ette and Gesine Müller (2012); ‘Philology and Racism. On Historicity in the Sciences of Language and Text’ in: Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales(Opens in new window) (2012). [March-April 2014]

​Dr Renata Schellenberg is Visiting Fellow at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory and Associate Professor of German at Mount Allison University, Canada. She obtained her PhD from the University of Toronto (2004) for a thesis on Goethe’s scientific writings. She has since published widely on 18th-century German literature and co-edited a collection of essays (2008) on word and image relations in 18th-century European culture. More recently, her research and publications have focused on museum studies and cultures of remembrance in 18th-century Germanophone Europe. She is currently completing a monograph on this subject to be published in 2014. A speaker of Croatian, Dr Schellenberg’s research has also evolved to examine recent Croatian history in the light of the country’s museological culture and commemorative practices. Hence her work at the Centre will explore the curating of conflict, specifically relating to the so-called Homeland War (1991-1995), in the EU’s newest member-state. [May 2014] 

Stef Craps(Opens in new window) is Research Professor in English literature at the University of Ghent, where he directs the Centre for Literature and Trauma. He is the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (2013) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (2005), and has guest-edited special issues of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (2011; with Michael Rothberg) and Studies in the Novel (2008; with Gert Buelens) on the topics of, respectively, transcultural negotiations of Holocaust memory and postcolonial trauma novels. His next book project, on which he will be working during his stay as Visiting Fellow at the Institute, is an introductory guide to the concept of trauma for Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series.[September 2012-June 2013]

Elisa Marti-Lopez(Opens in new window) graduated from the University of Barcelona in 1983 with a Llicenciatura in History, and obtained her PhD in Spanish Literature from New York University in 1995. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. She is the author of Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spain (2002), Un passeig pel Cementiri de PobleNou (2004), and Somnis de Barcelona: El Cementiri de Montjuïc, 1883-1936 (2008), and has published book chapters and articles on the popular novel and the literary market in 19th-century Spain. [Spring 2013]