Speakers
Serena Baiesi is Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Bologna where she teaches British Romanticism. Her research interests and publications are related to Romantic poetry, Leigh Hunt and political writings, Gothic literature, Romantic theatre and drama, Jane Austen and popular culture, slavery literature and Mary Shelley. She has edited several volumes, such as Gothic Metamorphosis across the Centuries (Peter Lang, 2020 with M. Ascari and D. L. Palatinus); Romantic Dialectics: Culture, Gender, Theatre (Peter Lang 2018 with S. Curran). She is the general editor with L. M. Crisafulli of the Series ‘Romantic Studies: Theories and Practice’ (Peter Lang).
Ivan Callus is Professor of English at the University of Malta, where he teaches courses in contemporary literature and literary criticism. He has published widely in the areas of contemporary fiction and poetics, comparative literature, literary theory and posthumanism. He is the co-editor, with James Corby, of CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary, launched with Edinburgh University Press in 2015. Among his most recent publications are The Springer Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, a co-edited volume forthcoming later this year, and book chapters on contemporary elegy, on tone, on Holocaust memoir, and on the genre of the newspaper column.
Francesca Caraceni is a Research Fellow in English literature at the Catholic University of Milan. Her main areas of interest cover Victorian studies, Modernism, translation theory and practice, and the interplay of religion and art. She has published essays and contributions on Samuel Butler, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and John Henry Newman among others. She is currently researching the literary legacy of John Henry Newman in 20th-century Ireland.
Daniela Cerimonia (BA John Cabot; MA King’s College London; PhD University of London) is Associate Lecturer in Italian at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Visiting Research Fellow in Comparative literature at King’s College London. She specialises in 19th- and 20th-century Italian, English, and comparative literature, with a focus on reception and translation studies, issues of canon formation and readership, Anglo-Italian relations, and notions of identity. She is the author of Leopardi and Shelley: Discovery, Translation and Reception (Legenda, 2015; Routledge, 2017), and has also written on Leopardi and his modern translators, Shelley and Dante, and representations of Italy in Romantic Europe. Her most recent research focusses on Black Italian literature, migrant literature and notions of intersectionality, with an emphasis on the role of Asmara.
Francesca D’Alfonso is Senior Lecturer in English literature at the University of Molise. Her main fields of research are late Victorian literature and culture and the American novel of the second half of the 20th century, mainly on Philip Roth. Her publications include Nel Mondo di John Fante: Autobiografismo e furore letterario (Aracne, 2013), Arnold Bennett: Narratore e interprete delle Cinque Città (Carabba, 2016) as well as many articles, mainly on British and American fiction. She is currently working on a monograph on George Eliot’s Adam Bede. She is a member of CUSVE (Centre for Victorian and Edwardian Studies) and of the editorial board of Traduttologia and NuovoMeridionalismoStudi.
Fabrizio Foni is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Italian and member of the Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies at the University of Malta, with a specialisation in popular culture. His research interests and publications are mostly in the areas of horror, the Gothic, the supernatural and the monstrous in general, including the multifaceted fictional representations of sideshows and freaks. He recently co-edited, with Fabio Camilletti, Almanacco dell’orrore popolare (2021) and Almanacco dell’Italia occulta (2022), both published by Odoya, a two-volume set investigating the Italian equivalents, given the different context, of British folk horror and urban wyrd.
Hal Gladfelder is Professor of English and comparative literature, with a focus on literature and culture of the 18th and 19th centuries. His books include Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England and Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland, and a critical edition of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Polly. His recent and current work focuses on the history of pornography and censorship, and on the figure of the castrato in 18th-century Europe. He came to the University of Manchester in 2006, having previously taught at the University of Rochester and Stanford University.
Cicely Havely worked for the British Open University from its foundation till her retirement and was Head of the Literature Department. Her research interests included the narrative techniques of Victorian novels, Indian post-colonial literature and the writings of pioneering women travellers. Retirement brought the opportunity to bring all these strands together in her debut novel, A Marble Column, a sequel to Jane Eyre.
Nick Havely is Emeritus Professor at the University of York, where he taught courses on English literature and Dante. His recent books include: Dante’s British Public (2014); and in the past year two co-edited volumes, Dante Beyond Borders: Contexts and Reception (a collection of essays by an international group of scholars) and After Dante: Poets in Purgatory (a new translation of the Purgatorio by 16 contemporary poets). He has held Leverhulme and Bogliasco Fellowships, and has been elected an honorary member of the Dante Society of America. His current project is a book on travellers in the Tuscan Apennines from the Middle Ages to the Second World War.
Gloria Lauri-Lucente is Professor of Italian and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta where she teaches Italian, comparative literature and film studies. She is Head of the Department of Italian and Director of the Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies. She designed and is the co-ordinator of the MA programme in Film Studies. She is the volume editor of the Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies and the author of numerous articles and book chapters, mainly on the lyric tradition, Anglo-Italian studies, and film studies. She is an honorary member of CUSVE (Centro Universitario di Studi Vittoriani e Edoardiani, Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio” Chieti-Pescara).
Stefania Michelucci is Professor of English Studies at the University of Genoa, Italy. She has written extensively on Modernism in an interdisciplinary perspective, with particular attention to the relationship between literature and the visual arts. Among her books, Space and Place in the Works of D.H. Lawrence (2002), The Poetry of Thom Gunn: A Critical Study (2009), The British Aristocracy in Popular Culture (with Ian Duncan and Luisa Villa, 2020). She has been a Visiting Scholar and has lectured in many universities around the world, including the University of California, Berkeley, the University of New Mexico, USA, Keio University, Tokyo and Kyoto Tachibana University, Japan, the University of Zululand, South Africa, New Hall, Cambridge, UK.
Francesca Orestano, Lecturer in American studies at Palermo University, Professor of English Literature at Milan University, authored monographs on the American Renaissance; William Gilpin and the picturesque; visual culture and narration. Edited books: Strange Sisters: Literature and Aesthetics; Dickens and Italy; New Bearings in Dickens Criticism; History and Narration; Le guide del mattino; Tempi moderni nella children’s literature; Not Just Porridge; Romanticism and Cultural Memory. Author of more than 150 essays on landscape gardening; English literature; art criticism; chemistry and taste; China in 19th-century London; Joyce and D’Annunzio; Virginia Woolf; in 2021 authored Le giardiniere: Semi, radici, propaggini dall’Inghilterra al mondo, and edited Some Keywords in Dickens.
Anna Enrichetta Soccio is Full Professor of English Literature at the ‘G. d’Annunzio’ University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy) and director of CUSVE (Centre for Victorian and Edwardian Studies). She has extensively written on 19th- and 20th-century literature and authors (Scott, Austen, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Gaskell, Hardy, James Thomson, E. M. Forster, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Philip Larkin, popular fiction and the fin de siècle). She has co-edited two volumes on the representation of the house in literature (The House of Fiction as the House of Life: Representation of the House from Richardson to Woolf, 2012, and a special issue of European Journal of English Studies, 2012). More recently she has co-edited Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives (2018), a special issue of Polemos. Journal of Law, Literature and Culture (2019) and an Italian translation of Emily Dickinson’s selected poems (2021).
Peter Vassallo is Professor Emeritus of English and comparative literature at the University of Malta. He was a Commonwealth Fellow at Oxford University where he obtained the degrees of MA and DPhil. He specialized in Romantic literature and has published widely in this field and on Anglo-Italian literary relations. He was formerly Head of the English Department and Chair of the Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies. He is general editor of the Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies which he founded. He is author of Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (1984) and editor of Byron and the Mediterranean (1986). His recent monograph is on British Writers and the Experience of Italy (2012). He is a Fellow of the English Association.
Nigel Wood is Professor of Literature at Loughborough University. His most recent publications include a study of Shakespeare and Response Theory for Arden Bloomsbury and articles on the decline of tragedy for the journal Countertext (forthcoming) and on Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare Survey) published in 2021. He is also engaged on a new biography of Alexander Pope for Princeton University Press.
Alison Yarrington, BA, PhD, FRSE, FSA, FRSA, is Professor Emerita of Art History (Loughborough University) and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow (University of Glasgow). Her research and publications focus upon women sculptors, the history of British art and sculpture c.1750-1914, sculpture’s display and collecting histories, and the Anglo-Italian marble trade. She was academic adviser to the Chatsworth Sculpture Gallery redisplay; PI for the AHRC/BA-funded project Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951 and chairs the Sculpture Journal Advisory Board.
