Conference Organisers

Contact: (opens in a new window)ucdiaries2023@gmail.com

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Mara Josi obtained her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Before joining Ghent University as an FWO Postdoctoral Fellow in the English and Italian sections, she was an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin and a lecturer at the University of Manchester. During her career,she has been investigating national, supranational, and transnational recollections of historical events in Italian 20th and 21st-century literature and culture. Her interest in such a field results from an almost decade-long engagement with Italian Holocaust culture and literary writings devoted to the processes of discrimination and persecution in Italy during the Fascist dictatorship, the Italian Social Republic, and the Nazi occupation.

Mara’sfirst monograph,Rome, 16 October 1943. History, Memory, Literature,is devoted to the literary production of the largest single round-up and deportation of Jews from Italy (Legenda, 2023).

She is currently working on a project which reorients the study of Italian Holocaust-related literary production by defining and investigating a new category of it: “the literature of hiding”, which consists of texts by Jewish authors that bear witness to the experience of living in hiding to escape deportation.  She examines how “the literature of hiding” can reshape the understanding and recollection of discrimination and persecution in Italy and broaden the discourse of the transmission and recollection of Holocaust-related experiences in Italy.

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Valeria Taddei is an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin. She obtained her DPhil from the University of Oxford with a research on Italian and Anglophone modernist short fiction. The outcomes are forthcoming as her first monograph, Epiphanies in the Modernist Short Story: Italian and English Perspectives (Routledge, 2024). 

Valeria's research interests lie in the field of comparative studies, literary criticism, and European literature between the 19th and 20th century, within which she likes to seek out transnational trends. Her current research project focuses on the handling of self in diaries written by French, English, and Italian modernist authors, including André Gide, Virginia Woolf, and Carlo Emilio Gadda. It aims to explore how these authors approached private self-writing in an age when the concept of 'self' was being questioned, and how their diary-keeping activity interacted with their aesthetic of literary experimentation.