Virginia Agostinelli holds a PhD in comparative literature and cinema studies from the University of Washington. Her dissertation was entitled “Mass Media, Mass Culture and Contemporary Italian Fiction.” In addition to teaching courses at the University of Washington, Dr. Agostinelli works with Rick Steves’ Europe as both a researcher and tour guide in her native Italy.
Francesca D’Alessandro Behr is an associate professor of Italian and Classics at the University of Houston, where she is also affiliated with women’s studies. Her research interests include the epic, gender studies, reception studies, narratology, satire, and comparative literature. She is the author of Feeling History: Lucan, Stoicism and the Aesthetics of Passion (2007) along with a variety of articles concerning Classic literature, narratology, and women authors.
Fabio Benincasa worked for two years for Rai TV in the educational department producing documentaries after graduating from the University of Rome, “La Sapienza.” In 2001 he moved to the United States where he earned an MA and later a PhD at Indiana University, Bloomington. His doctoral thesis, under the direction of Peter Bondanella, deals with the relationship between Italian cinema and Baroque art. In Italy, he was editor of the Festival of Architecture in Rome. A licensed journalist, he is a columnist for the monthly magazine Formiche. He teaches for Duquesne University Rome Campus and Gustolab. Among his most recent publications are “The Explosion of Rome in Fragments of a Postmodern Iconography” (2013) and “The Social Pope” (2014), an essay on the communication style of the current pope.
Daniela Bini is professor of Italian and comparative literature and was chair of the French and Italian Department from 2003 to 2011 at the University of Texas, Austin. Her research always incorporates her interest in philosophy with that of literature, focusing in particular on the issue of inadequacy of verbal language as exemplified by her books: A Fragrance from the Desert: Poetry and Philosophy in Giacomo Leopardi, Carlo Michelstaedter and the Failure of Language, Pirandello and His Muse: The Plays for Marta Abba, and in some recent essays on music, opera, and film. She is the author of over fifty essays on artists as different as Ippolito Nievo, Giacomo Leopardi, Giovanni Verga, Italo Svevo, Pietro Mascagni, Giuseppe Verdi, Luigi Pirandello, Leonardo Sciascia, Giuseppe Tornatore, the Taviani brothers, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli, and Marco Bellocchio. She is also the coauthor of two Italian textbooks.
Ryan Calabretta-Sajder holds a doctorate of modern languages in Italian and French from Middlebury College and is currently a visiting assistant professor of Italian at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. His interests include queer and feminist theory in contemporary Italian literature and cinema, gaze theory, Italian American literature and cinema, Sicilian culture, and migration studies. He recently published his first monograph, Divergenze in celluloide: Colore, migrazione e identità sessuale nei film gay di Ferzan Özpetek with Mimesis editore (2017). He serves as the director of communication for the American Association of Teachers of Italian, the president of Gamma Kappa Alpha, executive committee member of the Italian American Studies Association, Secretary/Treasurer of the American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators, and was co-chair of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Graduate Students in the Profession (2013–2017).
Ilaria Lanzarini is an independent scholar in semiotics of the arts and visual studies, which she perfected at the University of Bologna under the guidance of Francesco Marsciani and Lucia Corrain. She teaches British language and civilization in the Italian school system and collaborates with international journals with contributions of an interdisciplinary nature. At present, she’s involved in a project of intersemiotic translation among different artistic languages.
Millicent Marcus is professor of Italian and director of Graduate Studies at Yale University. She specializes in Italian culture from the interdisciplinary perspectives of literature, history, and film. She is the author of An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron (l979), Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (l986), Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (l993), After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (2002), and Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (2007), as well as journal articles and encyclopedia entries on her fields of interest. Because literacy in the twenty-first century must be broadened to include the mass media as well as the written text, she brings a cultural studies approach to her teaching and research.
Fulvio Orsitto is director of the Georgetown University study center in Fiesole (Italy). He previously worked as director of the California State University Study Abroad program in Florence (a. y. 2014–2015) and, between 2008–2014, as director of the Italian and Italian American program at California State University, Chico (at the rank of associate professor). He holds a PhD in Italian Cultural Studies from the University of Connecticut (2008), and has published numerous essays and book chapters on Italian and Italian American cinema, and on Italian Literature. His book publications include the edited volumes The Other and the Elsewhere in Italian Culture (2011) and Cinema and Risorgimento: Visions and Re-Visions (2012). In 2012 he coedited with Simona Wright Vol. XXXIV of the NeMLA Journal of Italian Studies, a special issue devoted to Contemporary Italian Cinema. In 2014 he published with C. Peralta and F. Caramaschi the manual Film and Education: Capturing Bilingual Communities. More recently, he coedited the following volumes: Cultural Contaminations (2014 with S. Wright); Pier Paolo Pasolini: American Perspectives (2015 with F. Pacchioni); Cultural Crossings (2016 with S. Wright); TOTalitarian ARTs: The Visual Arts, Fascism(s), and Mass-Society (2017 with M. Epstein and A. Righi); and The Italian Economic Boom in Cinema, Television and Literature (forthcoming in 2017 with U. Perolino).
Flaviano Pisanelli is currently an associate professor of Italian literature and language at the University Paul Valéry–Montpellier, France. Poet and translator, Pisanelli has dedicated much of his critical work to the literary and cinematic opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini along with a variety of other twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors (G. Ungaretti, E. Montale, S. Quasimodo, P. V. Tondelli, S. Grasso, G. Bufalino, A. Merini, M. Scalesi, etc.). Additionally, he focuses on the Italophone poetry of migration (Gëzim Hajdari, Barbara Serdakowski, Vera Lucia de Oliveira, Carlos Sanchez, etc.). His most recent publication is In poesis nomine. Onomastique et toponymie dans Le Occasioni d’Eugenio Montale et Trasumanar e organizzar de Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Daniela Privitera holds a doctorate in Italian studies with a focus on lexicography and semantics of Italian literacy and is currently a professor of humanities and Latin. Privitera is also an adjunct professor of Italian linguistics and Italian literature at the University of Enna “Kore.” Her research interests include Sicilian dialectology and Italian literature.
Francesco Rosetti is an independent scholar who graduated from the University of Rome, “La Sapienza” in 2006 with a thesis entitled “Marco Ferreri: frammenti di un discorso registico” (“Marco Ferreri: Fragments of a Directorial Discourse”). Rosetti has collaborated with the Department of Film History of “La Sapienza” contributing to a collected volume, Cineuropa, edited by Maurizio de Benedictis. He has published on various themes in Italian and European cinema, in Paratesto and Avanguardia, in addition to online journals, Cinemastudio and Offscreen.
Giulia Tellini completed her PhD in history of theater at the University of Florence, in 2008. She is the author of numerous essays on theatrical literature, actors, and film. Her monographs include Storie di Medea (2012) and Vita e arte di Gino Cervi (2013). She teaches at the Italian School of Middlebury College (United States) and at the Cultural Centre for Foreigners of the University of Florence. She is an honorary fellow in Italian literature at the University Federico II of Naples.
William Van Watson held a PhD in theater with minors in both Italian and cinema studies from the University of Texas–Austin. Van Watson taught at various institutions including SUNY Stony Brook, Washington University in St. Louis, and was most recently a visiting associate professor in Italian at the University of Arizona. His main research interests included Italian theater and film studies. He was working on a manuscript dedicated to Pier Pasolo Pasolini at the untimely incident of his death, which is forthcoming.
Anne Greeott holds an MA in Italian from Middlebury College and an MFA in literary translation from The University of Arkansas. Her translations have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Bitter Oleander, Journal of Italian Translation, Italian Poetry Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She has received Fulbright grants to Italy (2014), Peru (2008), and an ALTA Travel Fellowship (2015).
Chris Tamigi is a translator of twentieth century and contemporary Italian literature. He graduated from Tulane University with a BA in History and Italian in 2000 and received an MFA in creative writing and translation from the University of Arkansas in 2012.
Stephen Sartarelli was born in Youngstown, Ohio to Italian parents and spent several of his early and adolescent years in Italy. He obtained a BA in Literature and Languages from Antioch College and an MA in Comparative Literature from New York University. He has published three collections of poetry to date and translated over forty books of fiction, poetry, and essays from Italian and French. Notable authors past and present include Alessandro Baricco, Gesualdo Bufalino, Massimo Cacciari, Andrea Camilleri, Casanova, Jacques Cazotte, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Xavier De Maistre, Francesca Duranti, Laurent Gaudé, Pierre Klossowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Umberto Saba. He has earned a variety of honors for his translation work, including the Raiziss/De Palchi Award of the Acadamy of American poets (twice, for Saba and Pasolini), the Foreign Dagger Award of the UK Crime Writers Association (for Camilleri), and the John Florio Award of the UK Society of Authors (for Gianni Riotta), as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Conseil d’Europe, for the translation of the monumental Sicilian novel Horcynus Orca, by Stefano D’Arrigo, a project still ongoing. Sartarelli presently lives in France.