Speakers    

Vincenzo Bavaro is Associate Professor of U.S. Literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” (Ph.D Roma “La Sapienza”, M.A. Dartmouth College, NH, USA). He was Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA (2019-2020), and his publications include works on African Americana Drama and television, LGBT cultural history, and Indigenous activism.

Jan Beneš is assistant professor at the University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic, where he teaches survey courses in American and British literature and an academic writing course for doctoral students. He received his M.A. from Texas A&M University and his Ph.D. from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. His research interests include Black aviation and the fiction of George S. Schuyler, as well as Black literary engagements with the environmental justice movement.

Anna Cadoni graduated from the University of Cagliari with a dissertation on American Modernism and Faulkner. After graduation, she spent a year at Bowdoin College teaching Italian Culture and Language. She is currently a PhD candidate in American Literature at the University of Roma Tre. Her dissertation "Enduring Bodies: Politics of Affects in the Female Bodies of the Modernist American Novel" deals with corporeal feminism, African-American representation and queer desire in four novels written between 1920s and 1930s. Her fields of study include Modernism, Affect Theory, African-American literature and Intersectional Feminism.

Andrea Carosso is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Department of International Languages and Literatures. His latest (coedited) work is Coastlines, Oceans and Rivers of North America: Encounters and Ecocrises (Iperstoria 19, summer 2022). He is author of Cold War Narratives. American Culture in the 1950s (2012), Invito alla lettura di Vladimir Nabokov (1999),  T.S. Eliot e i miti del moderno. Prassi, teoria e ideologia negli scritti critici e filosofici (1995).

Cristina Di Maio is a Junior Assistant Professor in American Literature at the University of Torino, where she teaches American Literature and Culture. She is the author of essays on contemporary American women writers and in 2022 she published La posta in gioco. I giochi e il ludico nei racconti di Toni Cade Bambara, Rita Ciresi e Grace Paley (La scuola di Pitagora). In 2022, she also co-edited, with Daniele Giovannone and Fulvia Sarnelli, the collection of essays What’s popping? La Storia degli Stati Uniti nella cultura popolare del nuovo millennio (La scuola di Pitagora). Her academic interests include American Literature, Play Theory, Feminist Theory, Italian American Literature, and TV series.

Joel Duncan holds a postdoc in American Studies at the University of Konstanz. He is currently completing his book, Poetic Drive: Experimental American Poetry in the Age of Automobility. He has published articles in Modernism/modernity, Arizona Quarterly, Textual Practice, and Women’s Studies.

Leslie Eckel is Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, where she teaches American literature, the literature of travel and migration, utopian and dystopian literature, and women’s and gender studies. She is the author of Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World (Edinburgh UP, 2013) and editor (with Clare Elliott) of the Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies (Edinburgh UP, 2016). Her current projects include a monograph, Dwelling in Possibility: Atlantic Utopias and Countercultures, and a scholarly edition of the collected writings of Margaret Fuller (with Sonia Di Loreto and Andrew Taylor).

Katherine Fama is an assistant professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of English, Film, and Drama at University College Dublin. Dr. Fama co-directs the "Fictional Spaces" research strand at the Humanities Institute. She is currently completing a monograph entitled The Literary Architecture of Singleness, which uncovers the reciprocal relationship between the early 20th-century novel, domestic architecture, and single women in America. She coedited a recent essay collection on representations of single life (with Jorie Lagerwey) entitled Single Lives: Modern British and American Women in Literature, Culture, and Film (Rutgers UP, 2022). Dr. Fama's research focuses on narrative theory, domestic architecture, the history of emotions, singleness, and aging. Her work has been published in MELUS, Studies in American Naturalism, the Journal of Modern Literature, Emotions: History, Society, Culture, and elsewhere; with research funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Marie Sklowdowska-Curie Fellowship, and the NEH.

Lee A. Flamand, PhD is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (Research Associate) in American Studies at Ruhr University Bochum. He holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Freie Universität Berlin and is the author of American Mass Incarceration and Post-Network Quality Television: Captivating Aspirations (Amsterdam University Press, 2022).

Dr. Herrmann grew up in Indianapolis, moved west, and attended university at Western Washington University, going on to earn a Masters Degree in American Studies from the University of Turin and a Ph.D in Comparative History from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His most recent publication was, “'Pay For My Candy, [Non-White Person], or I’ll Kick Your Ass': Trump, Rocky, and Representations of White American Identity," in RSA Journal, 2020 (31).

Cristina Iuli is Associate Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli, Italy, where she coordinates the PRIN Project “Transatlantic Transfers: The Italian Presence in Post-War America,” and the U.S. Embassy “Mission to Italy” project: “Anti-Racist Pedagogies: Teaching American Literature in Ethnically Diverse Italy.” A specialist in modernism, in the XX and XXI century novel, in literary theory, science and literature, and in transatlantic studies, Iuli is author of several monographic studies, essays and translations. Among others: Effetti Teorici: critica culturale e nuova storiografia letteraria Americana (Torino, Otto Editore, 2002); Giusto il tempo di esplodere: il romanzo pop di Nathanael West (Bergamo University Press, 2004), Spell it Modern: Modernity and the Question of Literature (Vercelli, Mercurio, 2009), Nathanael West: Miss Lonelyhearts (Marsilio, Venezia, 2017). With Paola Loreto she edited La letteratura degli Stati Uniti: dal Rinascimento Americano ai nostri giorni (Roma, Carocci, 2017). Her essays are published on international journals such as, Modernism/modernity, Simploke, Arizona Quarterly, EJES, The Flusser Archive, Aut-Aut. Her current research focuses on Black Feminist Pedagogies and Transatlanticism in the Seventies.

Lisa Marchi teaches US Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Trento. She is the author of In filigrana. Poesia arabo-americana scritta da donne (La Scuola di Pitagora, 2019), the first monograph written in Italian on Arab-American poetry, and The Funambulists: Women Poets of the Arab Diaspora (Syracuse UP, 2022). Her new research project tentatively titled From Promised to Vanishing Land explores the poetic history of land ownership, dispossession, and reclamation within and beyond the US nation.

Dorottya Mozes is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. She is the author of Identity, Style, and Performance in the Postcolonial Novel (Debrecen UP, 2019). Her research combines African American literature, sonic studies, and environmental studies to examine the complexities of Black movement in America. Her current book project, Black Flânerie: Geographic Practice and Imagination inside Contemporary Spaces of Enclosure, reads the figure of the flâneur as a form of negotiating, evading, and contesting the spatialized violence necessary to racial capitalism.

Timo Müller is Professor of American Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His research focuses on modernism, Black poetry, and the environmental humanities. His work has appeared in journals such as American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He has edited several textbooks and written two monographs, The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction (2010) and The African American Sonnet: A Literary History (2018), which is now available in paperback from the University of Mississippi Press. He is director of the ERC-funded research project “Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility.

Ferdinand Nyberg is a postdoctoral researcher at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen in Germany, where he is part of a multi-member research team studying African American utopian discourses and Black experimental communities.

Marco Petrelli is assistant professor of American literature in the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics at the University of Pisa. He authored Paradiso in nero: spazio e mito nella narrativa di Cormac McCarthy (Aracne, 2020), Nick Cave. Preghiere di fuoco e ballate assassine (Castel Negrino, 2021), and several essays on Southern literature and culture, American gothic fiction, African American literature, Geocriticism, and graphic narratives that appeared in Italian and international journals. His current research project focuses on the role of ghosts in African American gothic narratives. He is a literary critic for the newspaper Il Manifesto.

Virginia Pignagnoli is “Juan de la Cierva” Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Zaragoza (Spain), in the Department of English and German Studies where she specializes in North American literature, post-postmodern fiction, and narrative theories. She has published articles in several journals including Narrative, Poetics Today, Neohelicon, Enthymema, and the European Journal of English Studies. She is the author of Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts (OSU Press, 2023).

Steve Pinkerton teaches writing and twentieth-century literature at Case Western Reserve University. His first book, Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh, was published by Oxford UP in 2017. He has also published articles in  Modernism/Modernity, Studies in the Novel, the Journal of Modern Literature, the African American Review, and elsewhere. In addition, he has also written essays on Ralph Ellison and on the Harlem Renaissance - forthcoming in the journal Genre and in The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion.

Giuseppe Polise is a post-doctoral researcher currently working at the University of L’Aquila.  In 2021, he defended his Ph.D. dissertation, titled "Ecstatic Kinaesthetics: African American Women Redefining Pleasure Through Diasporic Spirituality." He authored the articles “Beyond The Archives of Pain: Diasporic Memories of Ecstasy and the Black Feminine Divine in Beyoncé’s 6 Inch” (de genere 7, 2022), “Never Knew Love Like this Before: Signifyin(g) the Invisibility of Black Death in the 1980s Ballroom Culture” (de genere 6, 2020) and “Black Women Matter: the #BlackLivesMatte Movement, Black Female Singers, and Intersectional Feminism” (Iperstoria 9, Spring 2017). He was also the recipient of the 2019 Fulbright Scholarship and spent one semester at the College of Charleston (SC) as a Visiting Student Researcher.

Valentina Rapetti (MA, PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Tuscia. Her publications include articles on Toni Morrison, Djanet Sears, August Wilson, and Anna Deavere Smith, interviews with Marina Carr and Peter Sellars, and Italian translations of works by Marina Carr, Morris Panych, Netta Syrett, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her translations for the stage include contemporary Irish, English, Canadian and American plays, and Anne Enright’s memoir Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. Her main research interests span theatre and drama in English language, translation and adaptation in theatre, and African American literature.

Dr. Aida Rosende-Pérez is Lecturer in English at the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain. Her research has focused principally on the politics and poetics of transnational feminism, paying special attention to the narratives and audio/visual productions of transnational women writers and artists. Her research interests also include questions of embodiment, new materialisms, critical race studies and decolonial thought, and affect studies in relation to feminist and anti-racist cultural practices in the context of neoliberal globalization. She is currently working on a new research project that focuses on literary and audio/visual mediations of breathing in relation to Black feminist notions of survival as a radical form of politics. She has recently co-edited the volumes The Cultural Politics of In/Difference: Irish Texts and Contexts (Peter Lang, 2022) with Rubén Jarazo, and Family in Crisis: Crossing Borders, Crossing Narratives (Transcript Verlag 2020) with Eva Sabine Zehelein and Andrea Carosso. She is co-director of the book series “Estudis de Violència de Gènere / Studies on Gender Violence” (Edicions UIB), and she has been Managing Editor of Oceánide (Journal of the Spanish Society for the Study of Popular Culture). She has participated in different regional and national research projects, the most recent one “Bodies in Transit: Difference and Indifference in Globalized Cultures” (FFI2017-84555-C2-2-P), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.

Matteo M. Rossi (matteo.rossi@unito.it) is a Ph.D. candidate in Global History of Empires at the University of Torino, in Italy, where he is working on a dissertation on Henry Charles Carey’s political economy, under the supervision of Marco Mariano and Nicolas Barreyre. In Spring 2022 he was Doctorant Invité at the Centre d’Études Nord-Américaines of the EHESS and in Fall 2021 he was Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Department of History. His broad research interests include the nineteenth-century history of economic and political thought, the history of U.S. capitalism and working-class history.

Lisa Seuberth is a doctoral candidate in American Literary Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). After completing her teacher training in English and French in 2020, she worked as research associate at the Chair of American Literary Studies (Prof. Kley, FAU) and at the Chair of Modern German Literature (Prof. Niefanger, FAU). Her research interests focus on contemporary US-American literature, African American Studies, and Critical Whiteness Studies. The current working title of her dissertation is “Whiteness as Usual? American Africanism in the 21st-Century Novel.” It investigates the current position of Whiteness and Anti-Blackness in the US-American public sphere and how its award-winning literatures generate the respective value system in which those racial concepts develop. Since October 2022, she is working as research associate in the newly established research training group “Literature and the Public Sphere in Differentiated Contemporary Cultures.” Her last publications include articles on George Saunders’s award-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo and its strategies to deconstruct anti-Black and White supremacist discourses.

Bohdan Szklarski is  Associate Professor of Political Science, Graduate of the English Institute, Warsaw University and the Department of Political Science, Northeastern University, Boston. In his over 30 years of teaching he has taught at numerous American and Polish Universities. He served as a director of the American Studies Center, Warsaw University in years 2012-2016. Now he is the Head of the Leadership Studies at ASC.  He also lectures at Collegium Civitas a non-public college of social sciences. He guest lectured at many universities in USA, China, Germany, Italy, France, Greece, Czech Republic,  Georgia, Vietnam. Prof. Szklarski’s research interests include: political leadership, political communication, American political culture and institutions, comparative politics and political anthropology. Author of over 60 academic publications. He frequently appears as a commentator on American and Polish political events in the media.

Maria Ilaria Tonelli is a Ph.D. student in Digital Humanities and a Teaching Assistant in North American Literature at the University of Turin, Italy. She holds an MA in English and American Studies from the University of Turin, where she graduated in 2022. Under the supervision of Andrea Carosso and Stefano Morello, her MA thesis took the form of a documentary that sheds light on the little-known Italian community residing in the early 1900s in the Lung Block—an area situated in Lower Manhattan between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. During an Erasmus+ exchange program at the Freie Universitaet in Berlin in 2021, she also studied for a semester at the John F. Kennedy Institute. She is interested in North American literature, specifically in Postmodern fiction and in cultural products that imagine a different historical and geographical trajectory of the spread of fascist totalitarian regimes.

Andrew Wildermuth is a doctoral researcher in North American studies and member of the research group “Sentimentality in Literature, Culture, and Politics” at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg.