Scientific committee

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.

Ines Peta graduated in Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” (2005) and held a PhD in Philosophy, Sciences and Culture in Late Antiquity, Middle Ages and Humanistic Age from the University of Salerno and in Lettres-philosophie from Saint-Joseph University of Beirut (2010). From 2011 to 2019 she was adjunct professor of Arabic Language at Catholic University of Milan. Since October 2019 she was Senior assistant professor in Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Bologna. Since October 2022 she is Associate Professor. She deals in particular with religious vocabulary, especially theological, philosophical and mystical.

Dr. Jaqueline Berndt is a Professor in Japanology at Stockholm University. Previously, she taught Comics Theory at Kyoto Seika University, Japan. Her main academic work is in the areas of Comics/Manga Studies and Animation/Anime studies and engaged in relating New Formalism to Media Studies. She is chairperson of the Open Access series Stockholm Media Arts Japan (Stockholm University Press) and one of the managing editors of the book series Comics Studies: Aesthetics, Histories, Practices (de Gruyter). Besides, she directed the world-traveling exhibition Manga Hokusai Manga: Approaching the Master’s Compendium from the Perspective of Contemporary Comics for the Japan Foundation.

Rebecca Suter is associate professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Oslo. She teaches and researches on modern and contemporary Japanese literature and popular culture, with specific focus on cross-cultural representations. She has published on contemporary author Haruki Murakami, on manga, and on contemporary author Kazuo Ishiguro, among others. She has also worked as a translator of manga into Italian.

Teresa Pepe is Professor in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo. Her research interests span across Arabic literature, media, popular culture, sociolinguistics, and the relation between aesthetics and politics.

She is the author of the book Blogging From Egypt: Digital Literature, 2005-2016 (Edinburgh: EUP, 2019) and co-editor of the volume Arabic Literature in the Posthuman Age (with S. Guth, Harassowitz Verlag 2019) Her current research focuses on Arabic futuristic literature and its connection to social, political, and environmental changes in the region.

Elena Chiti is a cultural historian of modern Egypt and a literary translator from Arabic and French into Italian. She is an associate professor at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Stockholm University. Her work analyses cultural productions to explore the relationship between nation-building and belonging in times of turmoil. It embraces a broad time span, from the colonial epoch until today. She has been a team member of the ERC-project “DREAM: Drafting and Enacting Revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean (1950s-today)”, led by Leyla Dakhli. She is currently studying perceptions of justice and injustice in Egypt through criminal myths.

Giulia Aiello is a PhD candidate in Arabic language and literature at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Bologna. She is also a teaching tutor in Arabic language and literature at the same department. She is carrying out research on language practices starting from a corpus of independent Lebanese comics. Her main research interests are Arabic sociolinguistics, focusing on standard/vernacular variation in written texts, and contemporary Arabic literature, with a particular focus on graphic narratives. She has recently developed an interest on the theme of memory and trauma as well as on environmental issues in Arabic literature.

Giulia Colelli is a PhD student in Foreign Languages and Literature at Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna. 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.