Speakers' Information

Annecchiarico, Matteo graduated in 2020 in Linguistic, Literary and Translation Sciences at Sapienza University of Rome, where he studied Russian and Czech literatures and languages. His master thesis revolved around the original Italian translation of Aleksandr Beljaev’s sci-fi novel The air seller. He is currently in Prague, carrying out a PhD in Germanic and Slavic Studies, a double degree program between Sapienza and Charles universities. His research focuses on the analysis of the poetics and writing style displayed in the translations and diaries of the XX Czech poet Jan Zábrana. He also studies Czech underground literature and comparative translation.

Bibby, Leanne is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University. She is the author of A. S. Byatt: Fictions, Histories, Myths (2022) and co-editor, with Gina Wisker and Heidi Yeandle, of Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2023), both published by Palgrave. Her current research examines the ethics of historical fiction depicting events of the recent past.

Bruś, Teresa is associate professor at Wrocław University, Poland. Her major fields of research include visual culture, interactions of photography and literature, life-writing, poetics of the essay, and modernism. Graduate seminars in the past few years include “The Poetry of W.H. Auden,” “Autobiographical Spaces in the 20th century,” “Comparative Biography". She has published extensively on various aspects of life-writing and photography. Her most recent papers are on interiography, text/image hybridity in life-writing, experiments with images and writing, and the concept of dust in life-writing by Patti Smith. She is the author of Life Writing as Self-Collecting in the 1930s: Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice (2012) and Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

Carter, Kathryn is a full professor of English literature at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, Canada, and a visiting scholar at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century diaries and letters and appears in Life/Writing, Journal of Canadian Studies, and Australian-Canadian Studies, among others. She published an anthology of diary writing by women in Canada (University of Toronto Press 2002). A chapter on feminist interpretations of diary writing was published in The Diary: Epic of Everyday Life (2020) and an examination of letters written to Ireland from Canada in the mid-nineteenth century, was published in the Journal of Epistolary Studies (Fall 2022).

Cinelli, Gianluca (PhD) is an independent scholar expert in Italian contemporary literature with a special focus on war literature, autobiography, Nuto Revelli, Mario Rigoni Stern, Primo Levi, and Alessandro Manzoni. He has published extensively on the literature of the world wars with a focus on Italian and German case studies. He also published on Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville. He is co-editor of the Close Encounters in War Journal and an author of fiction and non-fiction.

Connor, Eamonn is a PhD candidate in the Lord Kelvin Adam Smith-funded project All Aboard: Life Narratives of the ‘Golden Age’ of Liners at the University of Glasgow. His project examines forms of life-writing on board ocean liners and cruise ships during the interwar period. He is interested in the cultural history of the leisure and the capital-labour relations that sustained the expansion of British shipping.

Dalmazzo, Pietro graduated in history from the University of Bologna and is a final-year PhD student in Italian studies at the University of Durham. His research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Northern Bridge scholarship. His research project explores the representation of Italian expansionism under Fascism, specifically focusing on how the Eastern Adriatic was portrayed within Italian culture during the regime. During his PhD, he collaborated with the 'Museo delle Civiltà' in Rome on a project that critically examined part of the collections of the former Italian colonial museum.

De Pasquale, Emma is a PhD student in Contemporary Italian Literature at Università “Roma Tre”. Her PhD research project, «Tutto è fatto di rumori»: scrittrici al microfono nel secondo Novecento, investigates the relationship between literature and radio in the works of Paola Masino, Maria Bellonci and Alba de Céspedes. The research is supervised by Professor Monica Venturini. In 2021 she graduated in Contemporary Italian Literature with a thesis on Masino’s writings in the feminist magazine Noi donne. During her first year of PhD she has attended national and international conferences and has published her articles in different academic journals.

Gillies, Patricia holds a Ph.D in French Language and Literature, with a comparative literature thesis on imagery from Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois. Having taught in the USA & Australia, she is currently a Senior Lecturer in Literature in the Department of Literature, film and Theatre Studies [LIFTS] at the University of Essex-Wivenhoe Park. Her publications reflect her training in languages, transcribing and editing manuscripts, women’s creativity and expression, the language of art and comparative literature. She has a long-term editing project based in the Sophie Gaudier Brzeska archive at the Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex-Wivenhoe Park.

Henderson, Desirée is Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington where she specializes in American literature, life writing, and women's writing. She is the author How to Read a Diary: Critical Contexts and Interpretive Strategies for 21st-Century Readers (Routledge, 2019), as well as many essays on diaries published in a/b: Auto/biography Studies, American Periodicals, and The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life, among other venues. She is currently co-editing an anthology of diary fiction, forthcoming from Bloomsbury.  

Käosaar, Leena is an Associate Professor of Cultural Theory at the Institute of Cultural Research at the University of Tartu in Estonia. Her research interests include the tradition of Estonian life writing and post-Soviet life writings, Baltic deportation and Gulag narratives, the diary, letters, self-representational writing of traumatic experience, relationality, memory and mobility, as well as creative nonfiction (life story writing) that she teaches at the University of Tartu alongside courses on literary and cultural theory, gender studies and Estonian literature. Since the spring of 2022, she has focused, within the framework of the project “Taking Shelter in Estonia: the Stories of Ukrainians Fleeing from the War,” on collecting the life stories of Ukrainian refugees in Estonia. Her research in the field has been published in The Journal of Baltic Studies, Prose Studies, Life Writing, and in several edited volumes and handbooks, most recently in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020) and The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life (Indiana UP, 2020). She is currently a Juris Padegs Research Associate at Yale University, where she is working on a monograph on Baltic women’s deportation narratives.

Katsantonis, Georgios graduated in Theater Studies from the University of Patras (Greece). He specialized in Literature, Writing, and Theater Criticism at the University of Naples "Federico II". He obtained, with honors, a doctorate in Literature and Modern Philologies at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. In 2021, his doctoral thesis won the thirty-seventh edition of the Pier Paolo Pasolini's Prize. He recently published a monograph on Pasolini entitled Anatomy of Power. Pasolini playwright vs Pasolini philosopher, Editions Metauro. Other contributions relating to Pasolini's literature are published in the international journals Studi Pasoliniani, Annali d'italianistica, and in the cultural journal Scenari by Mimesis Edizioni. He has been invited as a speaker at numerous national and international conferences.

Knight, Charlie is a Postgraduate Researcher at the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton and is funded by the Wolfson Foundation for his research into German-Jewish familial correspondence during the Holocaust. He has written, published and presented internationally on topics centred around the archive, letter writing, and knowledge of the Holocaust. Charlie was the joint postgraduate representative for the British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies and is currently an Outreach Fellow at the Parkes Institute and Communications Officer for the German History Society.

Kossel, Elmar since 2019 Senior Scientist at the Unit History of Architecture and Preservation of Monuments at the University of Innsbruck and previously from 2014–2019 research assistant at the same Unit. Research Group Management together with Klaus Tragbar Italy’s Appropriation Strategies in South Tyrol and Trentino after the First World War funded by the Thyssen-Foundation. He was a research assistant and previously a post- doctoral fellow from August 2009 until December 2011 at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max Planck Institut, working on the project Piazza e monumento. In 2016 he published the German translation of Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli’s Diary. He holds a PhD in Art History from the Freie Universität Berlin. He researches mainly twentieth-century architecture in Italy and Germany, with a focus on the fascist period and Modernism after the Second World War. Currently he is working on his postdoctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) on the topic Italy and its Three Capitals. Turin – Florence – Rome.

Kotsovili, Eirini D.  (B.A, McGill University, M.St, D.Phil, University of Oxford) is a Lecturer at SFU’s Global Humanities Department and member of the Stavros Niarchos Centre for Hellenic Studies and the Institute for the Humanities; she is an Associate member of the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies and the Department of World Languages and Literatures. She is a co-founder of the Memory and Trauma through Culture and History research cluster, together with Dr. Capperdoni and Dr. Horncastle. Her research and teaching interests revolve around the notions of identity, culture, gender, autobiographical writings and politics, twentieth-century literature.

Kownacka-Rogulska, Dorota art historian, linguist, assistant professor at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is currently working on a book about Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s encounters with art. She is also the author of a book on Rainer Maria Rilke’s texts on art. Her scholarly interests focus on outstanding writers who seek to develop an individualised way of writing about art, devoid of methodological constraints but grounded in creative necessity.

Lawson, Peter lectures in the Department of English and Creative Writing at The Open University. His research concerns European-Jewish and Holocaust literature. Among his critical works are two books on British Jewish poetry: Passionate Renewal: Jewish Poetry in Britain since 1945 (2001) and Anglo-Jewish Poetry from Isaac Rosenberg to Elaine Feinstein (2006). He is also a poet with a published collection, Senseless Hours (2009). His publications on Holocaust literature include Karen Gershon’s A Tempered Wind (2009), which I co-edited with Phyllis Lassner, and Open University postgraduate teaching material on Primo Levi’s Il sistema periodico (2022).

Lewer, Deborah is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on the German-speaking avant-gardes and on aspects of the relationship between modern art, politics and theology. She has translated several key texts relating to Dada and the wider avant-garde and is currently preparing a book on Hugo Ball.

Manara, Matilde holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 University (INSPIRE-Marie Curie Fellowship). Between 2020 and 2022, she has been Assistant Professor (ATER) at the University of Lille. She is currently a post-doc fellow at the Collège de France in Paris. She is the author of Diplopie, sovrimpressioni. Poesia e critica in Andrea Zanzotto (Pacini, 2021) and of L’intelligence du poème. Lyrisme et pensée chez Valéry, Rilke, Stevens et Montale (Classiques Garnier, in the process of publication), as well as of a number of other articles on Modernism, twentieth century Italian, French, Anglo-American and German poetry, literary genre theory and history of ideas.

Marcucci, Dario is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation explores the interplay between men and landscape in the Italian literature of the First World War. He teaches Italian language and culture, literature, and comparative literature at Hunter and Baruch College.

Miglianti, Giovanni is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Wesleyan University. He holds a Laurea in Lettere (University of Udine), an MPhil in Comparative Literature (University of Cambridge), and an MPhil and a PhD in Italian Studies (Yale University). His main research interests lie in modern Italian literature and cultural history, with a special focus on affect theory, biopolitics, and Holocaust studies. His first book project,Affect and the Holocaust: Rethinking Representation in Italian Culture (1944-2022), investigates Italian Holocaust memory through the lenses of emotion and sexuality.

Nabil, Rowa is an assistant lecturer and PhD candidate at the Department of English, Cairo University, Egypt. Specializing in cultural studies, she concluded a research project on Arab youth activism and protest songs accompanying the popular uprisings erupting in late 2010. Nabil is currently working on her PhD thesis, investigating memory narratives by political prisoners in Egypt, South Africa, and the USA, during the second half of the twentieth century.

Ó Liatháin, Pádraig is Assistant Professor in Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge, DCU. His research interests encompass Irish language literature from the 17th century to the present, literary connections with Newfoundland, and North America generally. He is currently editing and preparing for publication, the diaries of the 20th century Irish language poet, Seán Ó Ríordáin, housed in Special Collections in UCD. The first volume, containing diaries 1 & 2, has been published (2022), and Volume II (1942-50) is forthcoming (2024). He is also the former Irish language editor of the interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal Eighteenth Century Ireland.

O’Donoghue, Samuel is a Lecturer in Spanish Studies at Lancaster University. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Rewriting Franco’s Spain: Marcel Proust and the Dissident Novelists of Memory (2018) and works principally on contemporary peninsular Spanish literature. His research spans the fields of cultural history, trauma and memory studies, and the medical humanities.

Pendleton, Mark is a historian and Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield. He has published widely on modern and contemporary Japanese history, cultural and memory studies, including recently in Japanese Studies and The New Cambridge History of Japan. He is an editor at History Workshop Journal and co-edited the Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture. Mark is currently researching Japan's global social and cultural engagements during the early years of HIV and AIDS, with a particular focus on the period around the 1994 International AIDS Conference, which was held in Yokohama, Japan.

Pilsworth, Ellen is Lecturer in German at the University of Reading. Her current research project, ‘Knowing the Nazis, Inside and Out: Anti-Fascist Publishing in Austria, Germany and Britain, 1927-40’, is funded by a British Academy and Wolfson Fellowship. She has published articles on German literature and culture from the eighteenth-century to the present, and is now working on her first monograph, provisionally entitled Autobiographical Publishing for English Readers by anti-Nazi Refugees in the Years of Appeasement and War (1933-45).

Piredda, Patrizia MA (Arts), MA (Philosophy), MLitt, and PhD, has carried out her research in several European universities such as Glasgow, Rome “La Sapienza”, Oxford, Frankfurt, and Cologne. Her research interests focus on the investigation of the links between language and ethics. She has published scientific articles on Pirandello, D’Annunzio, Savinio, Levi, Calvino, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Thomas More’s Utopia. Amongst her publications: The Great War in Italy (2013); “L’etico non si può insegnare”(2014); Etica e letteratura della Grande Guerra (Marchese); Ethics and Italian Theatre of the Twentieth Century (2018), and Vera Amicitia (2021). She is co-editor of the Close Encounters in War Journal.

Piu, Matilde is a postgraduate student affiliated with the University of Pisa. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature (University of Pisa, 2023) and a BA in Literary Criticism (University of Siena, 2020). She carried out training and research activities abroad (Trinity College of Dublin, University of Edinburgh), and took part in international research groups (HCIAS_Heidelberg University, CIRCLE U._Oslo University). Her research interests lie primarily in twentieth-century Italian and Polish literature, women’s writings, and ecocriticism.

Rodak, Paweł is a historian of Polish culture, professor at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw (head of the Institute 2012-2016); professeur associé and director of the Center of Polish Civilisation at the Sorbonne University in Paris (2016-2019). His main publications: Wizje kultury pokolenia wojennego [Visions of Culture in the War Generation] (2000); Pismo, książka, lektura. Rozmowy [Writing, Book, Lecture. Conversations with Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, Jean Hébrard, Daniel Fabre, Philippe Lejeune] (2009); Między zapisem a literaturą. Dziennik polskiego pisarza w XX wieku (Żeromski, Nałkowska, Dąbrowska, Gombrowicz, Herling-Grudziński) [Between the Written Practice of Everyday Life and Literature. Polish Writer’s Diary in the 20th Century] (2011).

Roseau, Katherine is an Assistant Professor of French at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. She uses an interdisciplinary framework of theories in memory, genre, place, and cognitive studies to investigate the functions of life writing in war in order to understand how humans cope with acute threats to identity and stability. Her articles have appeared in French Historical Studies, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Textual Practice, and a/b Auto/Biography Studies.

Russian, Elisa is a postdoctoral fellow in the Romance Studies Department at the University of Zurich. She received her PhD in Italian Studies, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. Her current book project, titled Lived Critique, bridges the study of contemporary life-writing and social theory to demonstrate how hybrid forms of narration use personal experiences to advance critical arguments. Her recent publications include a study on spatial metaphors in Kym Ragusa’s memoir The Skin Between Us (California Italian Studies 12, no. 2, 2023).

Sederberg, Kathryn is Lucinda Hinsdale Stone Associate Professor of German Studies at Kalamazoo College. Her research focuses on National Socialism and its legacies, Holocaust diaries, and war and gender. She has published on diaries and literature from the Second World War and the postwar period, as well as on topics related to content-based language pedagogy. Her current project, Writing Home: Refugee Diaries of German and Austrian Jews, 1933-1945, considers the practice of diary writing during emigration and exile, and the changes in writing and its functions as the author is geographically displaced. 

Sepp, Arvi studied German and English Literature, Sociology, and Literary Theory in Leuven, Louvain-la-Neuve, Gießen and Berlin. He is Professor in Literary Studies and Comparative Literature at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and research fellow at the Institute of Jewish Studies in Antwerp. His research interests center on comparative literature, twentieth-century German (Jewish) literature, literary translation, autobiographical (mainly diaristic) writing. He has published the book-length study Topographie des Alltags. Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Lektüre von Victor Klemperers Tagebüchern 1933-1945 (2016). In the context of his research, he was awarded the Tauber Institute Research Award (Brandeis University) and the Prix de la Fondation Auschwitz (Brussels).

Sessolo, Federico is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Formerly a visiting researcher at Yale University, he is the recipient of the “Heimann-Stiftung Scholarship” at Heidelberg University. He specializes in early twentieth-century literature and culture, often adopting a comparative methodology. His doctoral dissertation, titled An Alliance of the Spirit, focuses on the political and cultural relationship between Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and Thomas Mann during their American exile (1938-1952).

Skamagka, Amanda studied Communication, Media, and Culture at Panteion University, Italian and Greek Philology at the University of Athens, is a master’s degree and a PhD holder in Comparative Literature from the Italian Language and Literature department (University of Athens), where she also conducted postdoctoral research. She has taught “Italian Novel”, “Italian Poetry”, “European Literature, “World Literature”, “History of Italian Theatre” and “Research Methodology” at the University of Athens and University of the Peloponnese. Her research interests focus on Italian and Greek Literature. She is the author and instructor of e-learning courses at the University of Athens E-learning.

Smith, Paula Vene is a professor of English at Grinnell College, Iowa (USA). She teaches literature and writing, including courses on the diary. Published work includes “Refashioning Diary Studies: The Tradition of Black Women’s Diaries” in a/b: Auto/biography Studies (2023) and “Day Today: Circadian Rhythms and the Sense of Unending in Poetic Diaries by Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen” in the Journal of Modern Literature (forthcoming). Recent shorter pieces on the diary include a review of Alice Walker’s journals for Salon, an essay on handwritten diaries for The Conversation, and an essay for Ms.Magazine on imagining the future in Black women’s diaries.

Sturli, Aurora is a second-year PhD student in Italian Studies at Cambridge University. She is working on women writers in post-Unification Italy, with a focus on their contemporary and later reception. Her project investigates potential correlations between women writers’ editorial strategies and their future destinies of recognition and oblivion in the Italian and international context. She completed her Bachelor and Master’s Degrees in Italian Studies at the University of Bologna.

Svobodová Barbora graduated from the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno with degrees in Czech Language and Literature and Art History, in 2022 she defended a PhD thesis focused on the role of literature within the activities of modern industrial shoe company Baťa in interwar Czechoslovakia. In addition to the Baťa phenomenon, she deals with literature and visual art of the 20th century, word and image relation, book culture, and graphic design. Since September 2023, she has been working at the Centre MODERNITAS at the Free University of Brussels (ULB) on her postdoctoral project thematising the relationship between the literature and industry.

Toporišič, Tomaž is a dramaturge and theatre theoretician as well as professor in Drama and Performance Studies at Academy of Theatre and Faculty of Arts at University of Ljubljana and an associate member of Slovene Academy of Science and Arts. An author of six books on performing arts and literature. His latest essays: "Deconstructive Readings of the Avant-Garde Tradition in Post-Socialist Retro-Avant-Garde Theatre" ([in:] The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange, 2013), "Death and violence in contemporary art (Frljić, Hilling, Semenič, G. W. Sebald)". Art History & Criticism, 2019, "Slovene historical avant-garde and Europe in crisis". Theatralia, 2022. His primary interest is to put in dialogue theory and practice.