Core 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.

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.

Emiliano Rossi holds a PhD in Cinema, Photography and Television at the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna, and 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 teaches Organisation and Management of Multimedia Systems at the University of Bologna, where he is also responsible of the Television and Web TV laboratory and class tutor of Media Management and Economics and Marketing of Audiovisual Media courses. He also works as an adjunct professor in in Radio-Tv Theories and Techniques at Università degli Studi di Padova. Together with Elisa Farinacci, he has been part of the organizing committee of the summer school since 2019; in 2024 he was part of the school's teaching staff. 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.

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).

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).

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".