Contributors Maristella Cantini is assistant professor of Italian at De Pauw University, IN. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin Madison, and a Laurea in foreign languages and literatures from the University of Pisa (Italy). Her research interests are centered on Italian women’s literature, women’s cinema, and postfeminist studies. Her forthcoming publications include two monographic works, respectively, about a contemporary Italian woman writer, and a woman director. Patrizia Carrano was born in Venice but lives and works in Rome. She has written plays and screenplays for theater and TV, including for several successful and popular TV series that gained a 34 percent audience share. She has published 17 books, and her essays range from Malafemmina. La Donna nel Cinema Italiano (1977) to the biography of actress Anna Magnani, La Magnani, il Romanzo di una Vita (1981, 2004). Her nov- els include Illuminata: la Storia di Elena Lucrezia Cornaro, Prima Donna Laureata nel Mondo (2000), Notturno con Galoppo (1996), and Le Armi e gli Amori (2003). She has received numerous awards and was recognized by the “Rhegium Julii opera prima” at the Premio Milano. As a journalist she has written for Sette, the magazine of Corriere della Sera, Elle, Amica, and other newspapers. Her forthcoming novel is Doppi Servizi, which narrates sixty years of Italian history through the gaze of the domestic staff of a bourgeois family. Fabiana Cecchini is an instructional assistant professor at Texas A&M University. She holds a Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere (English and French) from the Università degli Studi di Urbino (Italy) and a PhD in Italian studies from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. Her main scholarly interests are women’s studies, film studies, and the relationship between film and literature. She has published on Sibilla Aleramo, the nineteenth-century author and fem- inist and, in cooperation with Ioana Raluca Larco, recently has coed- ited a collection of essays focused on Italian women writers: Italian 274 CONTRIBUTORS Women writers and Autobiography. Ideology, Discourse and Identity in Female Life Narratives from Fascism to the Present (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011). Claudia Consolati is completing her PhD in Italian, cinema, and gen- der studies. Consolati holds academic certificates from the Center for Teaching and Learning; and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and Cinema Studies programs at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests include Italian cinema, women’s studies, cinema and religion, and twentieth-century Italian literature. Her presentations at numerous conferences have focused in particular on cinema and gender, the latest of which dealt with Greta Garbo’s performance in the filmic adaptation of Pirandello’s Come tu mi vuoi. Her article “Motherhood and Interrogation in Valeria Parrella’s Novel Lo spazio bianco (2008)” is forthcoming in the Italica. In 2010, she also published “Speaking Papers, Written Sounds: Female Voice and Oral Tradition in Maria Famà’s Looking for Cover,” in La Fusta. Ms. Consolati’s dissertation deals with the representation of women in postwar Italian cinema, in particular in the works of Rossellini, Fellini, Pasolini, and Cavani. Luke Cuculis graduated from Gettysburg College with a degree in chemistry and mathematics. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in physical chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign where his research focuses on genomic editing and the understanding of interactions between single molecules of DNA- binding proteins and DNA. While at Gettysburg College he developed a secondary interest in gender studies, particularly in constructions of masculinity in film. Daniela De Pau earned her PhD in Italian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an associate teaching professor at Drexel University, Philadelphia, where she lectures in contemporary Italian lit- erature and film and coordinates the Italian program. Her main research interests are women writers and directors, the relationship between literature, cinema, and other arts, the documentary tradition and lan- guage pedagogy. She is the author of numerous articles on contemporary Italian literature and film. She also coedited the books Watching Pages Reading Pictures, Cinema and Modern Literature in Italy (Cambridge Scholar Publishing, UK, 2008) and Zoom D’oltreoceano. Istantanee sui registi italiani e sull’Italia (Vecchiarelli, Italy, 2009), and cowrote Il Divo. Film Study Program (Edizioni Farinelli, New York, 2011) and the CONTRIBUTORS 275 reader Moda, Stile e Simboli (Edizioni Farinelli, New York, 2012). She is currently working on a book about female autobiographies. Laura Di Bianco is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center (CUNY), in the department of Comparative Literature. After earning her degree at the University of “Roma Tre” in Film History, she worked for many years at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia as an iconographic researcher and production coordinator for numerous film projects, including the documentary film series Ritratti Italiani—Archivio della Memoria and Mestieri del Cinema. Since 2007 she has been teaching at Queens College and Hunter College in the Romance Languages and Film and Media Studies Department classes on women filmmakers and contemporary Italian women writers in translation. She also teaches film at the New School Film and Food and Italian language at Fordham University. She is currently writing her dissertation on the representation of urban space and female subjectivity in the work of Italian women directors such as Marina Spada, Francesca Comencini, and others. Cristina Gamberi gained a PhD in gender studies from the University of Naples, Italy, for her thesis The Work of Angela Carter, in the Light of Bildungsroman and Fairy Tales. Since September 2010, she has par- ticipated in GEMMA, the Erasmus Mundus Programme of Excellence leading to the European master’s degree in women’s and gender stud- ies. She is currently based at the University of Hull, where she is writ- ing her dissertation on Doris Lessing’s autobiographical texts. Her thesis investigates the ambiguous tension in Lessing’s texts, which question autobiography as a genre in relation to gender, oscillating between the great masculine tradition of Western autobiography and a feminist representation of the self as fragmented and multiple. She is the coeditor of “Educare al gendere. Riflessioni e strumenti per arti- colare la diversità” (Carocci editore, 2010. Reprinted in 2011) and the author of numerous articles on British contemporary women writers. Her research interests include contemporary women’s writing, gender studies, feminist theory, the relationship between gender and educa- tion, film studies, and studies on masculinities. Lidia Hwa Soon Anchisi Hopkins earned her PhD from New York University. She is an associate professor of Italian at Gettysburg College, where she lectures on Italian language, literature, and film. Dr. Anchisi Hopkin’s scholarship is firmly grounded in feminist theory and examines ways of questioning traditional conceptualizations of gender and sexuality 276 CONTRIBUTORS in literature and film. She is the author of articles and presentations on subversive representations of femininity in Gabriele D’Annunzio, on les- bian desire and female sexuality in Italian erotic literature by women, and on French feminist theorists. She is currently working on two projects: an edited volume on race and ethnicity in Italy, and a study on transra- cial adoption in Italy. The connections between race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and class amongst other things, that immigrants and tran- sracial adoptees embody offer critical tools for delegitimizing negative stereotypes of race and gender and deconstructing mechanisms that maintain racial/gender order and effect racial/gender oppression. Claudia Karagoz is an assistant professor of Italian and affiliated faculty in the Women’s Studies Program at Saint Louis University. Her primary research and teaching interests are contemporary Italian literature, cin- ema and culture, gender studies, migration culture, and instructional technology. She has presented numerous papers on these subjects, and organized panels and round tables at national and international con- ferences. She has published articles on Italian women writers (“L’ottica inconscia del desiderio familiare in Cioccolata da Hanselmann di Rosetta Loy” in L’anello che non tiene. Journal of Modern Italian Literature and “Gazing Women: Elena Stancanelli’s Benzina” in Italica) and essays on Sicilian photographer and filmmaker Letizia Battaglia’s recent work (“Con occhi di donna: le nuove fotografie di Letizia Battaglia,” in Le sicil- iane (così sono se vi pare). Ed. Giovanna Summerfield. “Palermo Revisited: Letizia Battaglia’s Fine della storia” in Studies in European Cinema). Currently, she is also completing a manuscript on the representation of the mother-daughter bond in contemporary Italian feminist theory and women’s writing entitled Demeter’s Journeys: Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Italian Women’s Writing. Vera Golini She has been a professor of Italian studies at St. Jerome’s University since 1975, and since 1997 has also directed the Women’s stud- ies program at the University of Waterloo. She is currently president of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies. She also translated Dacia Maraini’s short stories, My Husband, published in English language in 2004. Dacia Maraini