2024 Faculty

Luca Barra is Full Professor at Università di Bologna, where he teaches Radio and Television History, Cultures of Television Production and Serial Tv Production, and a former post-doctoral research fellow at Università Cattolica, Milan. His research mainly focuses on television production and distribution cultures, comedy and humour TV genres, the international circulation of media products (and their national mediations), the history of Italian television, and the evolution of the contemporary media landscape. He is the author of the books La sitcom. Genere, evoluzione, prospettive (Carocci, 2020), Palinsesto (Laterza, 2015) and Risate in scatola (Vita e Pensiero, 2012), co-editor of A European Television Fiction Renaissance. Premium Production Models and Transnational Circulation (with M. Scaglioni, Routledge, 2021), Media-storie. Lezioni indimenticate di Peppino Ortoleva (with G. C. Calvagno, Viella, 2020), Taboo Comedy (with C. Bucaria, Palgrave, 2015), Backstage (with T. Bonini and S. Splendore, Unicopli, 2015) and Tutta un’altra fiction (with M. Scaglioni, Carocci, 2013), and has written essays in various edited volumes and journals. He is editorial consultant for Italian TV studies journal Link. Idee per la televisione and the co-director of SuperTele book series published by minimum fax. He is currently in the board of directors of Italian culture and politics journal Il Mulino, coordinator of the second cycle degree in INCOM – Information, Cultures and Media Organization and member of the scientific committee of the Master in Music Production and Promotion at Università di Bologna.

Professor Marini-Maio completed her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in Italian cinema. She is the Editor of the international open-access peer reviewed journal "gender/sexuality/italy". Her main fields of research are film studies, Italian cinema, and theater, particularly the intersections between politics, gender, cultural representations, popular culture, the narrative mode, and collective memory. She recently published a book on Silvio Berlusconi in cinema. Her monograph on the representation of left-wing terrorism in Italian film and theatre is near to completion. In addition, she is currently doing research on the "decamerotici," a series of movies inspired by Boccaccio's Decameron produced in Italy in the 1970s, and on Le Winx, an international comic strip and video series for young girls created in Italy. She has published articles on Italian cinema and theatre, Italian teaching pedagogy, and technology-enhanced language learning. In these areas, she has also co-edited the scholarly volumes Set the Stage! Teaching Italian through Theater (Yale University Press, 2009) and Dramatic Interactions (Cambridge Scholars, 2011). At Dickinson she is the current Director of the Mosaics Programs, and she also serves as the Vice President of the American Association for Italian Studies.

Dana Renga researches and teaches on Italian film and media studies, with a focus on television. She is core faculty in The Film Studies Program, and affiliated faculty in The Department of Comparative Studies and The Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She teaches courses on Italian film and television at both the undergraduate and graduate level and regularly teaches General Education courses. In addition to two monographs, one co-authored book, and an edited volume, she has published over forty articles and book chapters on Italian cinema and television, Italian popular culture, and modern and contemporary Italian poetry and literature. Her most recent monograph from 2019 is called Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television: Gomorrah and Beyond and offers the first comprehensive study of recent, popular Italian television. She is currently working on a book called #castingstardom (a project on casting practices in the US and in Italy), on a co-edited volume called Contemporary Italian Youth Television (with Luca Barra, Danielle Hipkins, and Catherine O'Rawe) and on second co-edited volume tentatively titled Transnational Italian Crime and the Making of Italy (with Stephanie Malia Hom).

Giacomo Manzoli is Full Professor of History of Italian Cinema at the University of Bologna, where he also teaches History of Italian Cinema and Audiovisual Forms of the Popular Culture. Currently, he is the president-in-chief of CUC - Consulta Universitaria del Cinema. He has been visiting professor at Urbino University, Catholic University in Milan and Tonji University of Shanghai, and he has held the course of Modernity Italian Style at Brown University, Providence, USA (2011 and 2017). He directed the Study Program of DAMS, Drama, Arts, Film and Music Studies from 2007 to 2010 and the Master Program in Film, Television and Multimedia Production from 2012 to 2014. He published several monographs and articles in journals and reviews. His current research is focused on the relationship between film industry and symbolic forms in contemporary Italian cinema, especially with regards to the role of public funding in promoting specific aesthetics and politics. He is also member of the board of the following journals: Studi culturali (il Mulino), Bianco & Nero (CSC), The Italianist (Maney), L’avventura (il Mulino), and co-director (with Mariagrazia Fanchi and Tomaso Subini) of Schermi. Storie e culture del cinema e dei media in Italia (University of Milan).

PhD in Cinema, Photography and Television at the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna, he is involved as a post-doc researcher in ATLas - Atlas of Local Television project. His main area of interest is television, framed on a historical, social and productive level. He is responsible of Television and Web TV laboratory and class tutor of Media Management and Economics and Marketing of Audiovisual Media courses at the University of Bologna. He also works as an adjunct professor in History and Theory of Television and New Media at “Aldo Moro” University (Bari) and in Radio-Tv Theories and Techniques at Università degli Studi di Padova. He collaborates with F-ACTOR - Forms of Contemporary Media Actorship (PRIN 2017). Together with Elisa Farinacci, he has been part of the organizing committee of the summer school since 2019. Some reflections of this experience have converged in a report published by La Valle dell’Eden (“Mediating Italy in Global Culture: l’esperienza di una summer school internazionale all’Università di Bologna”, co-authored with Elisa Farinacci). He took part in several national and international conferences, and his monography (Schermi di trasporto. Storia, produzione, immaginari) was published in 2023; his writings have appeared in volumes and journals, including Cinéma & Cie, Cinergie. Il cinema e le altre arti, Imago. Studi di cinema e media, La Valle dell’Eden.

Luca Bandirali (PhD) is tenure track Assistant Professor in Film, Photography and Television at University of Salento (Lecce). His primary research interest is in the area of Film and Television Theory, with a focus on issues of spatiality in film and television (environment, landscape, territory, place).  He is a member of the editorial board of the scientific journals Fata morgana and H-ermes. His most recent books include: Concept TV. An Aesthetics of TV Series (with Enrico Terrone, Lexington Books, 2021), Medium loci (Space, environment and landscape in audiovisual narration, Pellegrini Editore, 2022).

Art historian and Associate Professor of History of Medieval Art and Byzantine Art at the University of Salento (Lecce), after training in Lecce, Viterbo and the UK, she worked at the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max-Planck-Institut) in Florence and since 2006 she has been teaching at the University of Calabria and in Lecce. Her main research topics include Byzantine and Medieval iconography and iconology; the cult of saints between East and West; Byzantine sculpture in Greece and Asia Minor; issues related to execution techniques, diagnostics and the conservation of wall and panel artefacts; and, above all, monumental painting in the peripheries of the Eastern Empire (Southern Italy, the Balkans and the Caucasus). She has lectured both in Italy and abroad and her main publications include a monograph study on the iconography of the Virgin Mary as well as a certain number of articles.

Mario La Torre is Full Professor in Banking and Finance at the Department of Management, Sapienza Università di Roma. Mario does research in Banking, Financial Intermediaries and Financial Markets, Impact Finance and Ethical Finance, and Finance for Culture and Media Industry. He is the author and co-author of many international books and papers and is the editor of the series Palgrave Studies in Impact Finance. Mario is Responsible for the Center for Positive Finance and has promoted the University Alliance for Positive Finance; he is the author of the Blog "Good in Finance".

Dr Kate Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Italian Culture, Media and Gender at the University of Strathclyde. She is the author of two monographs (Italian Women Writers, Toronto 2014 and Gender, Writing, Spectatorships, Routledge 2022) and numerous journal articles and chapters in edited volumes on women and gender in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Italian literature, theatre, opera and film. She is one of the co-founders of the international interdisciplinary network Ottocentismi (an interdisciplinary and international network of Italian Nineteenth-Century Studies), and is currently working on a new project on Italian female screenwriters from the silent era.

Eleanor Paynter is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. She works on the media, literatures, and politics of migration with a focus on Africa-Europe mobilities and transnational Italy. Her research bridges critical refugee and postcolonial studies and examines questions of race, asylum, and belonging in Italy and the Black Mediterranean through narrative, documentary, and ethnographic methods. Her forthcoming book Emergency in Transit (University of California Press) engages oral, filmic, and written testimonies by Africans in Italy to both elaborate and imagine beyond the coloniality of emergency responses to migration. Eleanor is committed to collaborative media and public humanities initiatives, including podcasts like Migrations: A World on the Move, which she launched while a postdoc at Cornell. She holds a PhD in Comparative Studies (Ohio State University) and an MFA in poetry (Sarah Lawrence College). In Fall 2024 she will join the University of Oregon as Assistant Professor of Italian, with a focus on Global Media.

Giorgio Bertellini is Professor in the Departments of Film, Television, and Media and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. His main academic interests concern the traffic of films, peoples, and cultural forms between Italy and the U.S. His latest volume is The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America (University of California Press, 2019). He is the author and editor of the award-winning volumes Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape and the Picturesque (2010) and Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader (2013). His monograph on Emir Kusturica, written in Italian (2011) and English (2015), has been translated into Romanian and, in part, Chinese. He has published numerous essays on questions of geographic, racial, and national space in Italian and silent cinema in dozens of anthologies and journals. He is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies and co-editor (with R. Abel and Matthew S.) of the University of California Press book series, Cinema Cultures in Contact. 

Ellen Nerenberg is Hollis Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures at Wesleyan University, where she has served as the dean of Arts and Humanities. She is the current President of the American Association for Italian Studies. She is the author of Prison Terms: Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism (University of Toronto Press, 2001), winner of the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association, and Murder Made in Italy: Homicide, Media, and Contemporary Italian Culture (Indiana University Press, 2012). She is also co-editor of Writing Beyond Fascism (Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 2000) and of Body Of State: The Moro Affair, A Nation Divided (Fairleigh- Dickinson University Press, 2011), for which she also served as co-translator. She is editor of the Open Contributions and Continuing Discussions sections of g/s/I: Gender/Sexuality/Italy and reviews editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, as well as of the Italian Studies Channel on the New Books Network. Current research projects include: Winx Nation: Educare la futura consumista (forthcoming, Rubbettino Editore), a feminist media studies examination that centers on WinxClub, the animated TV series for girls and tweens, its formats, spin-offs, and titanic merchandising empire, and essays on the nostalgic cinema of Paolo Sorrentino, and the North American reception of the tv and literary serials with protagonist Detective Montalbano.  

Massimo Riva is Professor of Italian Studies and current coordinator of the Virtual Humanities Lab at Brown University. He has published on a wide range of topics, including several authored and edited or co-edited books on literary maladies and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, post-humanism and the hyper-novel, contemporary Italian fiction and the future of literature in the digital age. Since the 1990s, his pioneering work in the digital humanities has led to the creation of several projects, including the Decameron Web, recipient of two major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Virtual Humanities Lab, also supported by a two-year grant from the NEH, the Pico della Mirandola Project, and the Garibaldi Panorama & the Risorgimento Archive. He is the recipient of several fellowships, including a Digital Innovation fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He has recently completed a digital monograph entitled Italian Shadows. A Curious History of Virtual Reality, a project of the Brown Digital Publications Initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Standford University Press). In recognition of his research-based teaching, he was nominated Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence. His awards and honors also include the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for his contribution to the dissemination of Italian culture in North America.

Elisa Farinacci is a junior research fellow in Cinema, Photography, and Television at the Department of the Arts (DAR) of the University of Bologna. She earned a Ph.D. with a double degree in History at the Department of History, Culture, and Civilization of the University of Bologna and in Cultural Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At the Department of the Arts, she has been conducting research on the circulation and reception of contemporary Italian audiovisual products in Europe and the USA. She is also collaborating with the Research Center on Media Education, Innovation, and Education Technology (CREMIT) of the Catholic University of Milan. At CREMIT she is overseeing a project on the use of audiovisual products in educational environments. She is also the curator of the international column “Global Cremit: International Perspectives” and a member of the editorial board of "il Mulino". Since 2018, she has been co-organizing the Summer School "Mediating Italy in Global Culture".

Romana Andò is Associate Professor at Sapienza Università di Roma where she teaches Audience Research. Since 2020 she is the coordinator, together with Danielle Hipkins (University of Exeter) of the research project Girls'Eye View: Girlhood on the Italian screen since 1950s, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). Her research interests concern audience studies: media consumption practices, fandom practices, TV engagement and social television, fashion consumption; fashion sustainability, girlhood and gender studies. She authored many articles in international and national scientific journals and book chapters. Among her publications, Youtube Content Creators (Egea 2017) Television(s). Come cambia l’esperienza televisiva tra tecnologie convergenti e pratiche sociali (Guerini 2018), Audience for fashion. Consumare moda nei media e con i media (Egea 2022). Since 2018 she is the head of the international Master Programme in Fashion Studies at Sapienza University of Rome.

Marco Cucco is Associate Professor and Head of the postgraduate Master in Film and Audiovisual Management at the University of Bologna. He received his PhD in Communication Sciences at the University of Lugano (Switzerland), and he has been visiting scholar at several universities: City University of New York (USA), Université de Lorraine (France), University of Leeds (UK), and Universiteit Antwerpen (Belgium). His research interests concern mainly film industry and policy. He wrote three books and many articles published by international peer-reviewed journals like Studies in European Cinema, Film Studies, European Journal of Communication, Media, Culture & Society, Journal of Transcultural Communication, Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies. He is currently vice-chair of the Film Studies Section of ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association, and member of the editorial board of the scientific journal Economia della cultura.

David Katan is Full Professor of English and Translation at the Università del Salento (Lecce), specializing in intercultural communication, transcreation in multimedia translation and tourism translation. Publications include Translating Cultures: an introduction for translators, interpreters and mediators (Routledge, 3rd edition with Mustapha Taibi), contributions for the Routledge Encyclopaedias of Translation, Translation and Conflict, and Translation and Globalisation; the Benjamins Handbook of Translation Studies ('Intercultural Mediation') and for the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, and recently co-authored a volume on "The Human Translator" (2023) for Routledge. He is editor-in-chief of Cultus: the Journal for Intercultural Mediation and Communication. He is the Salento Investigator in a national project DIETALY, investigating the promotion of Italy in English over the last 100 years. As a translator he has recently tanslated the 200 page Jewish Salento Travel Guide. He has been keynote speaker for a variety of international conferences in Italy, Australia, Columbia, The Netherlands, Iraq and South Africa; and is currently Visiting Researcher at the University of South Africa.

Giancarlo Lombardi teaches Italian cinema and global television seriality, as well as modern and contemporary Italian literature, at the College of Staten Island and at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he directs the MA/PhD Program in Comparative Literature. He received his doctoral degree in Romance Studies at Cornell University and taught at the University of Rochester, Middlebury, Rutgers, Smith, and UPenn. He has published extensively on European and North American women writers, Italian film and television studies, cultural studies, and, most recently, on American serial drama. He is the author of Rooms with a View: Feminist Diary Fiction and the co-editor, together with R. Glynn and A. O’Leary, of Terrorism Italian Style and Remembering Aldo Moro, both dedicated to cultural representations of Italian political terrorism. His most recent publication is another co-edited volume, Italian Political Cinema. He is currently finishing a monograph on the rhetoric of fear in Italian television drama from the 60s and 70s, and just began working on a new research project on prestige serial drama from the Global North.

Paolo Noto is Associate Professor at the Università di Bologna, where he teaches and does research in the field of film history and culture. His research has been largely devoted to Italian cinema, and has integrated the textual analysis of films, with particular regard to the theoretical category of film genre, with the investigation of issues relating to production, industrial, technological and economic aspects, the role of state institutions, as well as consumption practices and critical reception. Among his publications are Il cinema neorealista (Archetipolibri, 2010, with Francesco Pitassio), Dal bozzetto ai generi: Il cinema italiano dei primi anni Cinquanta (Kaplan, 2011), and The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media (edited with Sara Pesce, Routledge, 2016). He is currently involved as principal investigator in the research TRAFFIC - Tracing American and Foreign Funds in Italian Cinema (funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research).

Marta Rocchi is Assistant Professor in tenure track in Cinema, Photography and Television at the University of Bologna. Leveraging her scientific background and research experience in Media Studies as a data scientist, she has developed expertise in executing projects characterized by interdisciplinary and systemic approaches. Her research interests primarily focus on quali-quantitative methods for analyzing contemporary audiovisual seriality, investigating gender inequalities within the audiovisual industry, and exploring the audiovisual communication of science. Among her most recent publications are: Audiovisual Data: Data-Driven Perspectives for Media Studies (2024 edited with G. Avezzù), Investigating Medical Drama Tv Series: Approaches and Perspectives (2024 edited with S. Antonioni), “Environmental Misinformation and Audiovisual Serial Narratives: An Automatic Analysis of the Twitter Social Discursiveness on Seaspiracy” (2022), “Women’s Labour in TV Series Production: A Comparative Analysis of Italian Generalist TV and Pay Platforms (2016-2019)” (2023).