Adriano Elia
Principal Investigator
Adriano Elia is Associate Professor of English at the Department of Political Science, University of Rome “Roma Tre”. His publications include essays on contemporary British fiction, Afrofuturism, W.E.B. Du Bois’s and Langston Hughes’s short fiction and poetry, Octavia E. Butler’s fiction, and six books – Heading South with Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (co-author, 2021), W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes – Two Remarkable Men (2020), La Cometa di W.E.B. Du Bois (2015), Hanif Kureishi (2012), The UK: Learning the Language, Studying the Culture (co-author, 2005), and Ut Pictura Poesis: Word-Image Interrelationships and the Word-Painting Technique (2002).
Stefania Arcara
Research Unit Coordinator
Stefania Arcara is Associate Professor of English Literature and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies “Genus” at the University of Catania. Her areas of research are feminist literary criticism, women’s and gender studies, cultural studies and translation studies. She has published on travel literature, women’s writing in seventeenth-century England, Pre-Raphaelite poetry, Victorian Hellenism and discourses on sexuality, British suffragism, 1970s Anglophone feminism, and the writings of Virginia Woolf. She is the author of numerous translations and is co-curator of the blog Manastabal. Femminismo materialista.
Giovanna Buonanno
Member
Giovanna Buonanno is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where she teaches modern and contemporary English literature and drama. She is the author of the monograph International Actresses on the Victorian Stage (2002) and co-editor of Remediating Imagination: Literatures and Cultures in English from the Renaissance to the Postcolonial (2016) and of a monographic issue on the playwright Tanika Gupta for the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (2022). Her research focuses on multicultural and transnational literature with a focus on women’s writing. She has published extensively on intercultural drama, Black and Asian British literature, and refugee writing.
Maria Paola Guarducci
Member
Maria Paola Guarducci teaches English Literature at Roma Tre University. Her interests focus on the relationships between the British literary canon and the empire, South African literature, women's writing, and Black British literature. She is the author of articles on various British authors and a book on post-apartheid South African novels titled Dopo l'interregno. Il romanzo sudafricano e la transizione (2008). She co-authored with F. Terrenato In-verse. Poesia femminile dal Sudafrica (2022), focusing on poetry in English and Afrikaans. Recently, she translated and edited two short stories by Joseph Conrad, The Idiots and Dom​ani, released under the title of Domani (2023).
Salvatore Marano
Member
Salvatore Marano is Associate Professor of American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Catania. His work explores the visual, aural and spatial relationships of literature in modernist and postmodernist writing; concrete and e-poetry; urban literature, comics and the graphic novel, performance writing, and the digital revolution. He has published essays on authors such as, among others, William Burroughs, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, John Barth, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Alice B. Toklas. The editor of the Italian translations of Mark Twain's A Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1992) and Djuna Barnes' Ladies Almanack (2014), his latest book is Boombox and the City (co-author, 2022).
Daphne Orlandi
Member
Daphne Orlandi has recently completed her PhD at Sapienza–University of Rome, in cotutelle with the Technische Universität Dortmund. In her doctoral thesis, she argued for a radical rethinking of R. W. Emerson as a literary globalist and demonstrated how he sketched a “permanent” canon of texts that embodied global ideals and could resonate with everyone at all points in history. Her main fields of interest include 19th century American literature, world literature, and women’s writing. She is especially interested in Transatlantic Studies, Transcendentalism as a social force, and in the origins and further developments of feminist theory in the US/UK.
Floriana Puglisi
Member
Floriana Puglisi is Associate Professor in Anglo-American Literature and Language at the University of Catania. Her interests focus on women’s poetry, experimental writing, interart relationships, poetry in performance, and new media contexts, with work on Anne Bradstreet, William Carlos Williams, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein. She is the author of Extremes of Otherness: Rosmarie Waldrop e l’incontro con il Nuovo Mondo (2015) and Transgressing Boundaries: A Geography of Anne Sexton’s Spirituality (2006), and editor of Performing/Transforming. Transgressions and Hybridizations Across Texts, Media, Bodies (2021) and Performare/Trasformare. Testo Immagine Azione (2022).
Silvia Romano
Member
Silvia Romano took her MA degree in English Literature at University of Catania in 2013, with a dissertation on Sarah Waters's Neo-Victorian novel "Tipping the Velvet". She is currently working on her PhD project on English Literature from a Gender Studies perspective. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on “The Mediterranean and the Classics in British Culture Between the 19th and 20th Century: Michael Field, Jane Ellen Harrison, Virginia Woolf and Daphne Phelps”. She has presented the results of her research at several international conferences and doctoral symposiums; she is affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies of the University of Catania “Genus”.
Francesca Terrenato
Member
Francesca Terrenato is Associate Professor of Dutch Language and Literature at Sapienza, University of Rome. Her research interests include, besides early modern cultural transfer and translation, Afrikaans literature (especially poetry) and gender issues in (early) modern and contemporary literary works. She has published books and articles on the relationship between literature and visual arts, Afrikaans women poets and migrant women authors in the Netherlands and in Flanders. She has translated and published Afrikaans poetry in Italian journals as well as a collection by Afrikaans poet Ronelda Kamfer. She currently investigates the relationship between English and Afrikaans poetry written and performed by South African women authors.
Serena I. Volpi
Member
Serena I. Volpi holds a PhD in English from Brunel University London. Her thesis on representations of body and time in African-American cultural anthropology earned the 2014 Brunel Prize for Doctoral Research. Her research focuses on African-American and Black Diaspora literatures, cultural anthropology, aging in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, Katherine Dunham’s and Hurston’s Caribbean ethnographies, indigenous futurism, and postcolonial Italy. She co-authored Heading South with Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (2021) and regularly reviews for L’Indice dei Libri del Mese. She is a Lecturer at Lorenzo de’ Medici, The Italian International Institute, Florence.
