Giorgia Alù

PhD (Warwick) MA (Warwick) BA (Catania)
Cassamarca Lecturer
Room 721, Brennan MacCallum Building A18

+61 2 9351 6887

GIORGIA ALÙ graduated in Foreign Languages at the University of Catania in 1997. In 2004 she completed a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Warwick (UK). Her research interests range from nineteenth-century Italian cultural history to comparative literature and visual studies. She has taught at the University of Warwick and at the University of Reading (UK).

• Travel writing;
• Nineteenth-century representations of Italy;
• Relationship between literature and photography;
• Memory and migration in contemporary women’s writing.

• A study on migration and photography in recent Italian fiction;
• A study of the Sicilian journalist and writer Giuliana Saladino (1925-1999);
• A conference and an edited volume on Italian literature and photography.

Books

• Beyond the Traveller’s Gaze: British Expatriate Women in Sicily (1848-1910) Peter Lang: Oxford/New York, 2008

Articles

• ‘Writing the familial past: historical and personal memoir in Sicily and England: Political and Social Reminiscences, 1848-1870, by Tina Scalia Whitaker’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, vol.8 (2006), 213-242.
• ‘Pan, the Saint and the Peasant: Southern Italian Bodies Imag(in)ed at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Mediterranean Studies, vol.14 (2005), 203-224.
• ‘The Unknown Sicily of Louise Hamilton Caico’, Studies in Travel Writing, 6 (2002), 78-95.

Book Chapters & Other Contributions

• Mythical ‘far-away-ness’: desire and idealization in Wilhelm von Gloeden’s photographs of Sicily, in In the Eye of the Beholder: Travel Literature, Translation and Otherness, ed. by Jan Borm (New York: Peter Lang, forthcoming).
• ‘Framing life: British women’s visual narratives of Sicily at the beginning of the 20th century’, in Le Mezzogiorno des écrivains européens / Europeans Writing the Mezzogiorno, ed. by Béatrice Bijon, Yves Clavaron & Bernard Dieterle, (St-Etienne: Presses Universitaires de St-Etienne, 2006), pp.175-185.
• ‘Beyond the observation of the “travelled reader”, in Bridges and Boundaries. Warwick Working Papers in Cultural Studies, ed. by S. Chotiudompant with E. Minutella (University of Warwick: Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, 2002), pp. 21-30. ISBN 0-9542465-0-0.

• Contemporary Italian literature;
• Contemporary Italian language and culture.

• Organizing: “Enlightening Encounters: Italian Literature and Photography Through Time”, 12-14 March 2009, University of Warwick (UK); link
• Recent papers:
  ‘Gazing at the past: memory and photography in women’s writing about migration’, AAIS and AATI Conference (Taormina, 22-25 May 2008);
• ‘Narrative, memory and photography in contemporary Italian women's writings about migration’, Photography: Theory, Practice and Debate, Study Day, Institute of Romance Studies (London, 7 July 2007);
• ‘Visual “truths”: British women’s photographic representation of Southern Italy’, Crossings & Borders VI (University of Palermo, 7-9 September 2006);
• ‘Memoria ed espatrio in Melania Mazzucco ed Antonia Arslan’. AIPI – Associazione Internazionale Professori d’Italiano Conferente (Ascoli Piceno, August 2006);
• ‘Through the Archives of the Past: Memory and Expatriation in Contemporary Italian Women’s Writings’. AAIS - American Association of Italian Studies Conference (Genova, 25-28 May 2006);
• ‘Alla ricerca di una casa. Le straniere oggi tra desiderio domestico e fuga in Italia’. Italia terra di rifugio (CIRVI and University of Turin, 3-4 June 2005);
• ‘Searching for a New Home: Italy in the Writings of Contemporary British Expatriate Women’. Contemporary European Women Writers: Gender and Generation (University of Bath, 30 March-1 April 2005);
• ‘Biografia, storia individuale e memoria collettiva nelle opere di Giuliana Saladino’. Shaping the Past: Questions of Identity in Italian Films and Literary Works since the 1980s (Italian Cultural Institute and Libre Université Brussels, 28-29 October 2004);
• ‘Pan, the Saint and the Peasant: Southern Bodies Imag(in)ed at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’. In corpore (im)material bodies in Italy, from the Middle Ages to the present days (Institute of Romance Studies, London, 16-17 April 2004).