I am the Director of Liberal Arts, and I teach on the Liberal Arts, Comparative Literature and Culture, and Modern Languages (Italian) programmes in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Culture. My teaching focuses mainly on literature and film, and my interdisciplinary interests revolve around modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture in a transnational context; colonial and postcolonial studies; and translingual and world literature.
Among the courses I typically (co-)teach are: Liberal Arts 2: Power and Dissent, ML1102 The Birth of Film, ML3207 Transnationalism, Globalization and Diaspora in Contemporary Film, IT2410 Advanced Italian Translation, IT2340 Post-War Italian Cinema: The Auteur Tradition, IT3860 Shooting History: Dictatorship, Terror and Crime in Italian Film, IT3990 The Postmodern in Italian Literature: Pioneers, Practitioners and Critics, and the forthcoming ML3125 Translingual Writing.
I am the author of Italian Orientalism: Nationhood, Cosmopolitanism and the Cultural Politics of Identity (2019), which explores the development of an Italian expression of European Orientalism, as well as discourses of race, identity politics and racial legislation in Italy and the Italian colonies between Unification and Fascism. I have also co-edited collections of essays on colonial and postcolonial Italy, as well as on religious themes in Italian culture, and have written on nationalism and colonial culture in the Italian and British contexts.
I am currently working on two new projects. The first explores the memory of Italian Somalia, with a particular focus on interracial relations, the East African Campaign during World War II, the British Military Administration, and the Italian protectorate leading to Somali independence. The other longer term project deals with contemporary translingual writers in world literature – authors writing in more than one language such Jhumpa Lahiri, Yoko Tawada, Elif Shafak, Xiaolu Guo, Amara Lakhous and others – and explores the dynamics of the relationship between language, emotion, identity, (self-)translation and creative writing as authors switch their languages.
