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New Cassamarca Appointment–Welcome Barbara Pezzotti!
Catherine Kovesi • August 18, 2022
ACIS is delighted to welcome Dr Barbara Pezzotti as the latest ACIS Cassamarca Appointee in European Languages/Italian at Monash University.
Monash University holds two of the prestigious ACIS Cassamarca positions. One of those positions is currently held by Professor Carolyn James. For the last several years the other position was held by Assoc. Professor Francesco Ricatti. However Francesco Ricatti's recent appointment to an Associate Professorship in Italian Studies at the Australian National University has opened up an opportunity for one of the ACIS community's most engaged and engaging members, Dr Barbara Pezzotti, to be inaugurated into the position.
Dr Pezzotti gained her PhD at Victoria University of Wellington. She is also a Chercheur associé at the Centre de la Méditerranée Moderne et Contemporaine (Université Côte d’Azur).
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 (Teaneck, NJ: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012); Politics and Society in Italian Crime Fiction: An Historical Overview (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014); and Investigating Italy’s Past through Crime Fiction, Films and TV Series: Murder in the Age of Chaos (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).
Dr Pezzotti is the co-editor (with Jean Anderson and Carolina Miranda) of The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations (London: Continuum, 2012); Serial Crime Fiction. Dying for More (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015); and Blood on the Table: Essays on Food in International Crime Fiction (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2018).
Her books have been positively reviewed in the most influential journals in Italian studies and in crime fiction/popular culture. They are also on the reading lists of crime fiction courses offered by UK and European universities. She is also the author of 24 peer-reviewed journal articles and 15 book chapters.
Her current research project is provisionally entitled “Mediterranean Crime Fiction: Place, Gender, Identity”.
Dr Pezzotti's reputation as a scholar has led to a number of invitations to present her research in seminars and workshops both in Australia and abroad: Queen’s University Belfast (2015, funded); Monash Prato Centre (2017; funded); Macquarie University, Sydney (2019), University of Bologna, Italy (funded, 2019), University of Urbino, Italy (funded, 2019), University of Milan (2020; funded), University of Newcastle (2021) and the University of Sydney (2020 and 2021).
She is a member of the Advisory Board of Cambridge University Press’s “Elements in Crime Narratives” book series and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Australian Journal, Spunti e Ricerche. She is also a member of the steering committee of the Australian European University Institute Fellowships (AEUIFAI) which provide postgraduate students and scholars the opportunity to carry out research at the European University Institute in Florence.
Dr Pezzotti was also the first Honorary Research Associate of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS), during which she was the lead coordinator of the project “Why Crime Fiction Matters” (WCFM, 2014-2016) which included the organisation of workshops and round-tables as well as the 2016 visit to Australia and New Zealand of Italian crime writer Giancarlo De Cataldo.
As well as being a regular contributor for “Il Sole 24 Ore”, the leading financial and economics newspaper in Italy, in 2022 she was appointed as a member of the international jury of the Premio Strega, the most prestigious literary prize in Italy. The Jury Abroad members are selected by the local Italian Cultural Institutes among distinguished scholars, artists, and translators living abroad.
She has a 12-year experience in coordinating and teaching Italian language and Italian and European culture at tertiary level and in developing new courses on crime fiction and popular culture, migrant literature, Italian cinema and European culture.
We are simply delighted to welcome Dr Pezzotti to the ACIS Cassamarca fold, and look forward very much to following her continuing career, reading her books, and listening to her research presentations.
Open until 14 April 2024, the exhibition Emerging From Darkness: Faith, Emotion and The Body in the Baroque is presented at Victoria's Hamilton Gallery (on the unceded lands of the Eastern Maar and Gunditjmara peoples), in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Unprecedented, and monumental in scope, Emerging From Darkness brings together an exceptional group of works from public and private collections in Australia. It was curated by Associate Professor David R. Marshall , Principal Fellow in Art History at the University of Melbourne, Dr Lisa Beaven , Adjunct Senior Research at La Trobe University, and Laurie Benson , Senior Curator of International Art at the NGV. Here two curators explain some of the project’s background and aims.
In Italy this year there has been no shortage of Manzoni celebrations, particularly in Milan . And in Australasia? Dr Stefano Bona , Lecturer in Italian Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide, on the lands of the Kauna nation, has lately been involved in creating a ‘special miniseries’ of radio programmes about Alessandro Manzoni. Now available for listening on demand are two longform interviews with Stefano Pratola at Radio Italiana 531 AM. Here Stefano Bona shares some background to this podcast project.
Announcing, with great pleasure, the winners of the 2023 ACIS Publication Prize for an established scholar, and the 2023 Jo-Anne Duggan Prize. ACIS awards both prizes every two years . In this case, each winning publication addresses the theme of mobility – a fast-evolving direction in Italian Studies research – and each brings forward a topic with clear contemporary significance.
The 12th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies will be held at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, from Wednesday 3 July to Saturday 6 July 2024. The conference theme is ‘Italian Studies for Global Challenges: Transdisciplinary Conversations’.
Open to postgraduate and early career researchers, since 2018 the ACIS Save Venice Fellowship programme has been enlivening close links between Australasia and the city of Venice. Fellowship applications were suspended in 2022, for pandemic-related reasons. So it is a special pleasure to announce that Brigette De Poi has been awarded an ACIS Save Venice Fellowship for 2023. Already living in Venice to focus on her PhD project, Brigette shares some first reflections on her contact with Save Venice thus far.
Which memories are allowed to circulate in a particular culture – and which are relegated or silenced? What political logic is at play when a certain way of remembering is spelt out, even imposed? Matthew Topp was awarded an ACIS Postgraduate Scholarship in 2020, to source archival records for his doctoral thesis, which has the working title ‘ Ars Oblivionalis : A Study of Cultural Forgetting in Renaissance Italy’. Now returned from fieldwork, he shares a brief account of his PhD project and travels.
Two promising early career scholars – Lauren Murphy and Julia Pelosi-Thorpe – were the recipients of ACIS Save Venice Fellowships. Delayed due to COVID travel restrictions, they were finally able to access their Fellowships in 2022. Here they both reflect on their time in Venice and the benefits of the Fellowship to their respective research projects.
ACIS is delighted to announce that Professor Andrea Rizzi has been appointed the new Chair of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies. He leads a renewed Management Committee with several new appointees who start their terms of office this year.
After a hiatus of three years due to travel restrictions, ACIS is delighted once again to be able to offer its Postgraduate Scholarships for Research in Italy. Two promising postgraduate students have been awarded scholarships in the current round: Brigette De Poi and Laura Di Blasi.