People

Paola Scrolavezza, translator and literary critic,  is Full Professor at Bologna University Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures. She teaches Japanese Culture and Literature and her research and teaching interests include women's literature as well as the intersections between media, literature and urban space. Recently, she has become interested in cultural processes, addressing the circulation of fiction in the new media age, and the construction of transnational imagery in the context of globalization.

Gino Scatasta teaches English Literature and Media Cultures of Anglophone Countries at the University of Bologna. He has worked on William Butler Yeats and Victorian literature, in particular Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. He published a book on London’s bohemian scene (Fitzrovia o la Bohème a Londra, 2018). One of his main interests is 1960s British pop culture. He is president of the Italian Oscar Wilde Society and oversees with Paola Scrolavezza the Research Center Power to the Pop at Unibo.

Gianluca Coci is Full Professor of Japanese Language and Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures of the University of Turin. He is the Coordinator of the Asian and Mediterranean Studies Section and Delegate of the Rector for Exchanges with Japan. His research area is Modern and Contemporary Japanese Literature, especially writers such Abe Kōbō and Ōe Kenzaburō, and postmodern authors such as Takahashi Gen’ichirō and Murakami Ryū. He has published numerous books and papers in several languages about Contemporary Japanese Literature; he has about seventy translations of novels by various authors to his credit (Nobel Prize Ōe Kenzaburō, Abe Kōbō, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and many others). In addition, he is Director of the Asiasphere publishing series focusing on literature from Japan, Korea, China and South-East Asia.

Veronica De Pieri is a Senior researcher and Adjunct Professor in Japanese Studies at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna. Her interests have focused on testimonial narrative, trauma studies, and the ethics of memory since 2011, with a comparative perspective (Shoah literature, atomic bombing literature, 3.11 literature). She has also been trained in assessment and intervention in traumatic situations (Master Program). She is currently working on dystopia as a literary tool to portray psychological distress and social malaise. She is also an Italian translator for atomic bombing and Fukushima literary testimonies.

Anna Specchio works on modern and contemporary women's literature, with a particular focus on the relationship between women and technologies and the representations of women in contemporary literature and media-which she examines from the perspective of feminist and posthuman studies. She is particularly interested in reproductive and queer dystopias. She has written several essays and has translated into Italian novels by various women authors including Iwaki Kei, Sakuraba Kazuki, Hayashi Mariko, Kashimada Maki and Li Kotomi.

Luca Paolo Bruno, Dr. Phil. (Leipzig University), focuses his research on digital games where the establishment, development and fulfillment of intimate relationships with fictional characters is central to the gamic experience, with particular attention to visual novels and erotic digital anime-manga games. His present research efforts center on the incorporation of so-called parasocial phenomena - reception of social interactions with fictional characters in a way not unlike relationships with actual living beings - into game design practices. In particular, he investigates how such emergent phenomena contingent on an individual's imaginative capabilities can be re-conducted to repeatable and consistent gamic experiences. 

Valeria Stabile is a research fellow and adjunct professor of Hispanic American Literatures and Spanish Language. Valeria’s research focuses on linguistic and cultural phenomena that inhabit Mexican literature from sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s oeuvre to queer and border literature of the 21st century. Valeria earned the Ph.D. title in Gender Studies and Hispanic American literatures from the Universities of Bologna and Utrecht and in 2023 received the first honorable mention of the LASA Sylvia Mollow award. Among Valeria’s latest publications: the translation of Rita Laura Segato Contro-pedagogie della crudeltà (Manifestolibri, in publication), and Pues no soy mujer. The Upheaval of Singularity in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (ilMelangolo, 2022).

Juan Scassa is a research fellow at the University of Turin. He began investigating dystopian narratives with the cinema of Ishii Sogo, and then focused on manga with his master’s thesis Interior Paths and Other Geographies: New Science Fiction Paths in Contemporary Manga. Specialised in alternative manga, he has translated many authors, including Tsuge Yoshiharu, Tezuka Osamu, Nagai Gō, Matsumoto Tayō, Nishioka Kyōdai.

From Spanish, he has translated Marcianeros by Oesterheld and López.

He has written on gekiga and dystopias for many publications, including Linus and Not.

He is currently translating the cyberpunk author Ōhara Mariko and the dystopian manga Nippon Sangoku.

Giulia Colelli is a PhD student in Foreign Languages and Literature at Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, enrolled in the World Literature curriculum of the XXXVII Ciclo. Their main research interests include contemporary Japanese literature, and Women and Gender Studies, Dystopian and Utopian Studies. Their current research focuses on dystopian productions written in Japan after the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, and especially on those texts that explore the idea of hybridism between human and non-human, offering new ways of thinking about diversity and what it means to be human in a time of intra- and interspecies violence such as environmental collapse and climate change. 

Beatrice Masi is a PhD candidate and teaching tutor at Alma Mater Studiorum, Bologna. Her research focuses on developing an ecomarxist analytical framework for the reading of semi-speculative literary works pertaining to the Irish economic boom and subsequent downturn. She has also worked as a literary translator from English and Spanish into Italian.

Marta Olivi has been a doctoral candidate at Unibo since 2021 (37th cycle); she is enrolled to the doctoral course in Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures - Diversity and Inclusion (Curriculum EDGES - Gender and Women's Studies), within a joint degree programme with Utrecht Universiteit (NL). She is interested in posthuman and New Materialist philosophies applied to contemporary Anglophone feminist dystopias with a particular focus on the theme of food seen through its material-semiotic interactions with the female body. She is also a "cultrice della materia" and teaching tutor in the field of Anglophone Literature (L-LIN/10) at the University of Bologna.

Federica Moscatelli is PhD candidate for the XXXVIII cycle in Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures: Diversity and Inclusion - World Literature and Postcolonial Studies curriculum, L-LIN/06, Hispano-American Languages and Literatures.

Her research interests include postcolonial studies, border studies, migration, and dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature in the Hispano-American context. She graduated from the University of Bologna with a thesis on Central American migration to the United States and carried out two periods of study and research in Mexico. Her doctoral thesis carries out an analysis of the reconstruction of alternative and communitarian futures in dystopias and post-apocalyptic narratives in contemporary Hispano-American literature.