About

The Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) is …

... a lively connection point for the communities of Italianist scholars in Australasia and beyond. Its core mission is to promote teaching and research in the field of Italian Studies throughout Australasia. 


Founded in 2000 in the wake of a substantial philanthropic donation by the Cassamarca Foundation in Treviso, Italy, ACIS is a Public Company Limited by Guarantee, registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) as a Charity and Not-for-Profit organisation. Tasked with stewardship over the initial Cassamarca investment, ACIS administers its annual income in a range of initiatives to further its core mission. These include: part-funding of the Cassamarca Appointments in Italian Studies at universities throughout Australia; hosting of a biennial conference; sponsorship of various Fellowships and Scholarships; promotion of key research initiatives; and awarding publication and other prizes.


ACIS is overseen by a Board with representatives from across Australasian universities where Italian studies are taught. 


Read here for a brief overview of ACIS and the Cassamarca Foundation. For a full account of our history, see David Moss and Gino Moliterno (eds.), Italy under the Southern Cross: An Australasian Celebration of Dino de Poli and the Cassamarca Foundation (Sydney: Padana Press, 2011). A downloadable PDF of this book is available here.


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ACIS Celebrates its 20th Anniversary ...

Our Inspiration

Italy and Australasia have many points of intersection, not least the substantial communities of Italians who have made Australia and New Zealand their home, enriching and enlivening the cultures that they found. But perhaps surprisingly the relationship between the two areas of the world has a longer history, predating European settlement. The earliest printed description and illustration of the southern hemisphere’s unique stellar constellation, the Southern Cross, was made by an Italian, the adventurer Andrea Corsali (b. 1487). During Corsali’s 1516 ocean voyage from Lisbon to Cochin (Kochi), India, he observed a distinctive array of stars, unknown to the northern hemisphere. In a letter to his patron, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici, Corsali wrote of a “marvellous Cross” pointing to the South Pole. Giuliano was so intrigued that he had the letter printed. Today only four copies are extant, one of which was acquired by the State Library of New South Wales to whom we are grateful for permission to reproduce the relevant page of Corsali’s letter, pictured here atop N.I. Piscator/ Claes Janszoon Visscher’s 1652 Nova totius terrarum orbis geographica ac hydrographica tabula.

Image courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

" apparisce una Croce maravigliosa in mezzo di. v. stelle che la circundano … con altre stelle che con epse intorno al polo fanno girandola … fa suo corso in xxiiii hore & di tanta belleza che non mi pare a nissuno celeste segno comparando : come nella forma dinanzi appare …”


"a marvellous Cross appeared in the middle of five stars which surround it … and of such beauty that to me no other celestial constellation can compare to it ...”

Our Patron

ACIS is delighted to have Santo Cilauro as its patron. A proud Italo-Australian, Santo Cilauro graduated from Melbourne University in Law and Arts. A founding member of Working Dog Productions, he has written, performed, shot, edited, directed, produced and provided catering for films such as The Castle, The Dish and TV Shows including D-Generation, The Late Show, Frontline, Russell Coight’s All Aussie Adventures, The Panel, Hollowmen, Thank God You’re Here, Have You Been Paying Attention?, Santo, Sam and Ed’s Total Football and Utopia. He has received multiple Australian Film Industry, Logie and Aria Awards, as well as a nomination for an International Emmy. He is also a recipient of the NSW Premier’s Literary Award and an ‘Italy In The World - Italia Nel Mondo’ prize for his work enhancing the image of Italian excellence in the Arts abroad.

Governance

The Australasian Centre for Italian Studes (ACIS)  is a Public Company Limited by Guarantee, registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) as a Charity and Not-for-Profit organisation. ACIS has its Constitution, approved by its Founding Members and Directors of ACIS Board in 2024. 

The Board and its Chair are responsible for the overall direction of ACIS and for stewardship of its monies in accordance with the Constitution and Deed of Trust signed by the Cassamarca Foundation and The University of Western Australia in 2001. Its Directors are academics from universities in Australia and New Zealand, elected from different states and from the principal areas taught under the rubric of Italian Studies – language, literature, linguistics, history, politics, culture, film, society, migration studies. The Board also includes a Project Manager (ex officio) appointed by the Directors.


The Board meets at least once a year, including at the biennial conferences. ACIS holds an AGM every year (in December)

There are also several other sub committees whose members are drawn both from the Management Committee and externally, according to relevant expertise:

 

  • The Review Committee responsible for reviewing the annual reports from the ACIS Cassamarca appointees. 
  • The Scholarships Committee responsible for assessing applications for the annual ACIS-Cassamarca Scholarship/s for study in Italy by Honours, Masters by Research and PhD students enrolled in Australasian universities. 
  • The ACIS Save Venice Fellowship Committee responsible for assessing applications for the annual three-month Fellowship based in Venice. 
  • The Prizes Committees responsible for assessing applications for the publication prizes. 

 


ACIS Board of Directors and Project Manager

CHAIR

  • Andrea Rizzi

    Andrea Rizzi is ACIS Cassamarca Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Melbourne. Born in Rome and raised in Italy in a bilingual family, Andrea was trained as a scholar and teacher at the Università Statale di Pavia (Italy) and the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK).


     Before coming to The University of Melbourne (2005), Andrea held positions in the UK, at the University of Western Australia, and at the University of South Australia.


    Between 2015 and 2019 Andrea was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. In 2010-2011 he was awarded the Harvard University's Deborah Loeb Fellowship at the Villa I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.


    Andrea is an early modern literary and translation history scholar with an interdisciplinary approach to the study of this significant period of European culture: having been trained as a philologist as an undergraduate student at the University of Pavia (Italy), Andrea then developed a focus on the transmission and tradition of historical Latin texts throughout the Italian Renaissance. Cultural history, literature, and translation studies are therefore the three interconnected streams of Andrea's research.

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  • John Hajek

    John Hajek is Professor of Italian Studies and director of the Research Unit for Multilingualism and Cross-cultural Communication (RUMACCC) at the University of Melbourne. He completed his tertiary studies at the universities of Melbourne, Florence, Padua and Oxford, before returning to Australia first to take up an ARC postdoctoral fellowship in linguistics and before joining the Italian Studies program at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and in 2019 was awarded the AFMLTA medal and received the FIPLV international citation for his efforts in the areas of language education and multilingualism. Originally trained as an Italian dialectologist and Romance linguist, he now has a broad range of language-related research and teaching interests. He publishes extensively including in Italian Studies. Recently completed studies include the representation of Italian language learning and teaching in the Australian press, as well as the presence of Italian in Melbourne’s linguistic landscape.

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  • Carolyn James

    Carolyn James, ACIS Cassamarca Associate Professor in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University, is an historian of late-medieval and Renaissance Italy. She has edited the letters of the fifteenth century literary figure, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, analysed his literary works (Olschki, 1996 and 2002) and translated, with Antonio Pagliaro, the late medieval letters of Margherita Datini (Centre of Reformation and Renaissance Studies Toronto, 2012). She is presently working on an Australian Research Council funded project on the Italian Wars (1494-1559) with Professor Susan Broomhall and Dr Lisa Mansfield. Her new monograph entitled A Renaissance Marriage: The Political and Personal Alliance of Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga 1490-1519, has recently been published by Oxford University Press.

  • Barbara Pezzotti

    Barbara Pezzotti is an ACIS Cassamarca Lecturer in European Languages at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include crime fiction and popular culture, literary geographies and utopian literature. She has published on Italian, Spanish, New Zealand and Scandinavian crime fiction. She is the author of The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction. A Bloody Journey (FDU Press, 2012); Politics and Society in Italian Crime Fiction: An Historical Overview (McFarland, 2014); and Investigating Italy’s Past through Crime Fiction, Films and TV Series: Murder in the Age of Chaos (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). She is the co-editor (with Jean Anderson and Carolina Miranda) of The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations (Continuum, 2012); Serial Crime Fiction. Dying for More (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015); and Blood on the Table: Essays on Food in International Crime Fiction (McFarland, 2018). Her current project is provisionally entitled “Mediterranean Crime Fiction: Place, Gender, Identity”.



  • Mark Seymour

    Mark Seymour is professor of History at the University of Otago, New Zealand – where he has worked since 2004. He earned a BA (in Italian and Economic History) at the University of Sydney, and a PhD at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians (Palgrave, 2006) and Emotional Arenas: Life Love and Death in 1870s Italy (Oxford, 2020). With Penelope Morris and Francesco Ricatti, he co-edited Politica ed emozioni nella storia d’Italia dal 1848 ad oggi (Viella, 2012), and with Sean Brady, From Sodomy Laws to Same-Sex Marriage: International Perspectives since 1789 (Bloomsbury, 2019). He has also published articles and book chapters, the latest of which is ‘Global Happiness’ in the Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World (2022). He was co-editor of ASMI’s journal Modern Italy from 2015-2020, and, with Milena Sabato of Salento, is currently preparing a primary-source reader on Italian history from the eighteenth century to the present.

  • Julie Robarts

    Julie Robarts holds a PhD and MA in Italian Studies from the University of Melbourne. She has worked as Italian Lecturer (Level B, Fixed term) at ANU in 2022, Italian Lecturer, (Level B, fixed term)at La Trobe University, Melbourne (2019) and sessional Tutor at the University of Melbourne (2020). She has also worked as Co-Director and Administrator, Art Cubed Pty Ltd. She has been awarded several research grants and fellowships, including the AEUIFIA Post-doctoral Fellowship, European University Institute, Fiesole (2024) Redmond Barry Fellowship, SLV & University of Melbourne (2023); Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Venice Scholarship (2020), and the ACIS Cassamarca Foundation Scholarship (2017). Her most recent research project is funded through the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Venice Scholarship (2026) and is on Venetian Opera, pro-Spanish conspiracies and extra-judicial killing - a broader context for the Strozzi Unisoni controversy and the Satire et altre raccolte per l’Accademia de gli Unisoni in casa di Giulio Strozzi.

COMING SOON

  • Josh Brown

    Josh Brown is a historical sociolinguist  at UWA. He is Chair of Modern European Languages and Associate Professor in Italian Studies. After his PhD, Josh completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stockholm University, then taught at ANU for several years before returning to Perth. 


    Within Italian Studies, Josh has specific interests in language change in the history of standard Italian and Gallo-Italian varieties; historical multilingualism in the Italian peninsula; language/dialect contact and language ideology in the Early Modern Period. Much of the material I work with makes use of unpublished and unconventional archival manuscripts to deal with questions of linguistic variation in the past. 


    His first book looked at early evidence for tuscanisation in non-literary texts sent from Milan in the late fourteenth century. A second, co-authored book, provided a study of the nearly 200 extant letters held in the New Norcia Archive and written in Italian by a priest in colonial Western Australia. A third volume has recently been issued by Brepols, entitled Languages and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in Renaissance Italy (co-edited with Dr Alessandra Petrocchi, University of Oxford). I have edited a special issue of Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (with Anita Auer, Université de Lausanne) on the role of merchants in language standardisation, as well as a Festschrift in honour of E/Prof Kinder (with Marinella Caruso). I am currently preparing a sixth volume, on issues of the early circulation of language and supralocalisation in Renaissance Milan for De Gruyter [contracted].


    I am part of the research groups UWA Medieval and Early Modern Studies, UWA Space Centre (Emotions in Space research node), a current affiliate member of ANU’s Centre for Early Modern Studies, an associate of the ANU Centre for Digital Humanities Research, and a former affiliate of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. I am the former stream leader for historical sociolinguistics at ANU’s Centre for Research on Language Change. I am part of the editorial board for the journal La lingua italiana: storia strutture testi published by Fabrizio Serra, Rome, and an elected fellow of the Associazione per la storia della lingua italiana. Currently I am treasurer for the Languages and Cultures Network for Australian Universities. I am the 2025-26 Australian European University Institute Fellow, and will be based at the EUI in early 2026.


  • Paola Tiné

    Paola Tiné is a medical anthropologist and an award-winning artist-anthropologist researching the interconnections between morality, relationships, and health, and she is passionate about contributing to our understanding of how these dimensions impact people's well-being. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Nepal, Australia, and Italy. Here she explored themes of family and kin relationships and conflict, inter-generational communication, and constructions of moral personhood, and examined how these are entangled with experiences of health and disease (including depression, spirit possession, and digestive health) through qualitative ethnography and creative methodologies. She also studies issues pertaining to ethnicity discourses, the experiences of racialised identities, and affects and emotions in contexts of distress. 


    Paola Tiné's recent book 'Modern Dharma: Seeking Family Well-Being in Middle-Class Nepal' (The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) investigates how and why, in contemporary Nepal – amidst conflicting necessities – people make moral choices in the name of well-being. To explore these dynamics, she coined the notions of ‘modern dharma’, as a process involving the negotiation and revision of old and new ideals of family, societal, and individual well-being, and a constant reflection on the moral ways to do so, which is largely conceptualised through notions of modernity and tradition. This book is accompanied by a visual gallery of some of ethnographic portraits and images realised in oil and mixed media, which is hosted on the University of Pennsylvania Press website and can be seen here. Her other monograph, 'She Fell and Became a Horse' (Dev Publisher, 2024) is in the genre of the ‘art book’ and it has won the prestigious Rieger Award for Exceptional Work in Visual Sociology by the International Visual Sociology Association. This work is an example of her active development of a creative body of work that draws from and intersects with ethnography and anthropology, providing a novel example of the use of the art book genre to explore social issues and distress. Her current book project (with A. Leotta), 'Truvari A Fudduni', tells the story of how the most important 1600' folk Sicilian poet is remembered nowadays by the local people and how people's voices convey an ambivalent desire and a reticence to embrace Sicilian culture and identity. 


  • Giulia Torello-Hill

    Giulia Torello-Hill is an internationally renowned expert in the reception of classical Roman drama in the Italian Renaissance. Her research explores the interplay between exegesis of ancient texts, iconographic tradition and performance practices in Renaissance Italy. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and intersects Italian Studies, Renaissance Studies, Classics, Intellectual History, History of the Book, Art History, Visual Culture and History of Theatre. She has made important advances in the knowledge of humanist conceptualisation and the appropriation of ancient poetics and theatrical practices, and how these processes were accelerated though the printing press.


    Giulia is the recipient of highly prestigious collaborative grants and international fellowships. She was a Chief Investigator of the ARC Discovery Project Scripts without a stage: Roman Comedy in the Early Italian Renaissance (DP150100974), which challenged the opinion that Terence’s plays were not understood as theatre and investigated the dynamics of change in this key period in relation to ideas of theatre. In 2015-16 she was awarded a Hanna Kiel Research Fellowship at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and in 2018 a residential Renaissance Society of America-Kress Foundation Short-Term Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago. These fellowships are the most coveted in field of Renaissance Studies.


    For her full academic profile see here.