Notes on Contributors
Jessica R. Boll
is Associate Professor of Spanish at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin, USA. Her research centers upon early modern Spanish-Ottoman relations, contemporary Christian-Muslim relations in Spain, shared spaces, and contested perceptions of place. Her investigations combine geography, history, cultural studies, literary studies, Mediterranean studies, and Ottoman studies. She has recently published articles related to the legacy of al-Andalus in contemporary Spain, Spanish tourism, the controversies surrounding the Mosque-Cathedral (Mezquita) of Córdoba, Cervantine captivity, and the depiction of Istanbul in early modern Spanish literature.
Samuel Boscarello
is a Ph.D. student in History at Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, carrying on a research project about the transnational circulation of European cooperative practices between 1848 and 1895. His research interests cross History and Social Sciences: after having obtained his Bachelor Degree in Political Sciences (University of Catania), he attended the regular class at Scuola di Politiche, institute for political studies directed by former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta. He also collaborates with the national television network RAI, taking part periodically as a guest to the historical program Passato e Presente.
Roberta Cauchi-Santoro
is an Assistant Professor in Italian Studies at the Department of Italian and French Studies, St. Jerome’s University, University of Waterloo. Dr. Cauchi- Santoro’s research interests are in psychoanalytical feminist criticism, Italian women writers, particularly contemporary writer Elena Ferrante, Leopardi Studies and Anglo-Italian literary relations. She has published a monograph with Firenze University Press titled Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett (2016). She is also the author of several articles about various aspects of Anglo-Italian literary relations, theories of humor and Italian women writers, particularly Ferrante. Since July 2019, she is part of the executive committee of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies.
Antonio Cecere
is cultore della materia of History of the Philosophy of the Enlightenment at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata.’ He is the editor of the series Filosofia e pensiero critico for Castelvecchi editore and of the series Lessico Mediterraneo for Mimesis editore. He is vice-president of the research group ‘Filosofia in Movimento,’ member of the scientific committee and of the scientific evaluation committee of the Observatory on Cooperation and Security in the Mediterranean (OCSM) at the University of Salerno. He has authored essays on the French Enlightenment and the Mediterranean Enlightenment. His latest works include: Lumi sul Mediterraneo (2019) edited with Antonio Coratti; Lessico Resistente (2019); Utopia e Critica nel Mediterraneo (2021) edited with Laura Paulizzi and Mediterranean Enlightenment (2021) with Halima Ouanada and Dionysis Drosos.
Elena Frasca
is a researcher of Modern History at the University of Catania. She deals with the history of institutions, deepening the relationships between universities and urban power in the Southern Italy of the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing attention on cultural and scientific or lay-welfare associations. She has also studied travelers’ diaries in Sicily, underlining the relationship between the discovery of classicism and contemporary political instances, the criminal legislation in the Bourbon Southern Italy, the school regulations and that linked to marriage law. Her interests have mainly focused on the socio-political role of doctors and surgeons: Il bisturi e la toga. Università e potere urbano nella Sicilia borbonica. Il ruolo del medico (secoli XVIII–XIX), Acireale-Roma, Bonanno, 2008; L’eco di Brown. Teorie mediche e prassi politiche, Roma, Carocci, 2014; L’oro, il fuoco e la forca, in G. Barone (a cura di), Storia mondiale della Sicilia, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2018, pp. 227–230. For L’eco di Brown she won the “Elide Stramezzi” award, bestowed by the Academy of History of Healthcare on November 26, 2015 in Rome.
Valentina Grasso
is an Assistant Professor of Medieval History at Bard College. She was previously an Assistant Professor of Semitics at The Catholic University of America in Washington (DC), a Visiting Assistant Professor at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, and an affiliate member of the ERC project “The Qurʾan as a Source for Late Antiquity.” She is currently part of the committee of the London Society for Medieval Studies and a chair of the SBL/IQSA “Qurʾan and Late Antiquity” Program Unit. She holds a Ph.D. (Divinity, 2021) from the University of Cambridge, where she completed her doctoral dissertation, which was published as a monograph, Pre-Islamic Arabia. Societies, Politics, Cults, and Identities during Late Antiquity, by Cambridge University Press in 2023. She is currently working on her second monograph while co-editing a volume on Indic imagery (Brepols 2024) and a special issue on Arabian epigraphy and Early Islam.
Sherine Hafez
is Professor and Department Chair of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the Co-Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS) and served as President for the Association of Middle East Anthropologists (AMEA). Hafez’s research focuses on gender studies in Arab, Middle Eastern cultures and the Mediterranean. She has authored several books including The Terms of Empowerment: Islamic Women Activists in Egypt (2003), An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism In Women’s Islamic Movements (New York University Press, 2011) and Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium, (Indiana University Press, 2013). Her most recent book Women of the Midan, The Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries (Indiana University Press, 2019) discusses Egypt’s revolutionary women and gendered corporeal resistance in the Middle East. Her articles have appeared in American Ethnologist; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Feminist Review; Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and Journal of North African Studies.
Stefania Licata
(Ph.D. Stony Brook University, 2017) teaches Spanish language, literature and culture, Film and Media as well as her area of expertise in Contemporary Migration from Africa towards Spain. In addition to her Ph.D., she has also received an MA in Hispanic Languages and Literatures and a MA in Technology and Pedagogy of foreign languages. Being originally from the Mediterranean basin, Dr. Licata’s exposure to the intersections and cultural crossings unique to this area played a crucial part in defining her research’s focus on migration and cultural representations between Africa and Spain, during the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. Dr. Licata’s research interests involve an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, as they include Afro-Hispanic postcolonial studies (with a focus on Equatorial Guinea), women’s studies, performing and visual arts.
Marco Pioli
graduated in Literature and Modern Philology at the University of Macerata. He enriched his academic education at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, where he earned a master’s degree in Teacher Training Programme and a PhD with a thesis concerning the relationship between Leonardo Sciascia and the Spanish culture. His current role at the same university is of Honorary Collaborator of the Romanic, French and Italian Studies and Translation Department. He specializes in Italian Modern and Contemporary Literature, Cultural Studies and Language Learning. He has written essays and delivered speeches not only on Sciascia, but also on the cultural relationships between Italy and Spain, Primo Levi, literature of migration and cultural and social aspects related to the teaching of Italian as a foreign language. He is the author of the monograph Mario Puccini: dalle Marche alla Spagna, Nuovi Orizzonti, 2011.
Rosario Pollicino
is currently an Instructor in Italian Studies at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Western University, Ontario, an MA in Italian Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Connecticut, and an MA in Pedagogy of Italian as a Foreign Language from the Università per Stranieri di Siena. He is co-editor of Italian Experiences of Trauma with Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2022) and is completing his book manuscript which retrieves the Italian settlers’ collective (and traumatic) memory originating from the colonial period in Libya. His scholarly interests include literary, cultural, documentary and film studies. Specifically, his interdisciplinary interests focus on Transnational Italy and Mediterranean studies. His comparative approach intertwines with postcolonial literature and cultural production, migration, diaspora and trauma studies.
Elena Serina
is a PhD student in Global History and Governance at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, in Naples, Italy. For her thesis project, she is currently working on the influence of Catholic internationalism in Italy and Spain in relation to the development of the right of social assistance from the Thirties to the Sixties. In 2020 she graduated in Contemporary History at Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori of Pavia. For her Master’s research, she has been a Visiting Student at Sorbonne Université, École Normale Supérieure de Paris and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Giuseppe Serrantino
is Associate Lecturer in Criminology at Middlesex University (UK). His research interest focuses on white collar and organized crime. After gaining international research practice in both quantitative and qualitative research design, data collection and analysis, he is currently part of a research team investigating the exploitation of reception centers for migrants by criminal networks in Greece and Italy. He is also finalizing two research projects on the relationship between political clientelism and corruption in Sicily and on the neo-melodic music as a culture expression of organized crime in southern Italy.
Maria Sorbello
is Associate Professor of Geography in the Humanities Department of the University of Catania. She is currently professor of Geography in the degree course in Letters, Cultural Geography in the degree course in Sciences and Languages for International Communication and Geography of Population and Territory in the master’s degree course in Sciences for International Cooperation. Since the academic year 2007–2008, she is a member of the PROGEO Research Center for Geographical Planning and Research of the University of Catania, of the Italian Geographers Association (AGEI) and of the Italian Geographic Society. Her scientific production, according to a methodology poised between theoretical research and experience in the field, mainly deals with issues relating to the landscape and its sustainable enhancement; to cultural tourism, as a promoter of well-being and wealth for local populations in full respect of the environment and the cultural heritage of the territories, in compliance with the principles of sustainable development; to multiculturalism and migration flows in the Mediterranean area.
Giovanna Summerfield
Professor of Italian and French at Auburn University, where she has also served for ten years as Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts, received her PhD in Romance languages and literatures with a minor in European and Mediterranean history from the University of Florida. At Auburn she created and directs an undergraduate Mediterranean Studies certificate. Summerfield has published extensively on French and Italian literature of the long- eighteenth century, women’s studies, film studies, and Mediterranean studies. Among her most recent publications are Sicily on Screen. Essays on the Representation of the Island and Its Culture (2020) and Sicily and the Mediterranean: Migration, Exchange, Reinvention (2015). She currently serves as Book Review Editor of Modern Italy, Cambridge University Press, as editor-in-chief of Italica, University of Illinois Press, and as founding co-editor of a new journal on modern and contemporary Mediterranean Studies, I.S. Med. Interdisciplinary Studies on the Mediterranean, Mimemis International.
Filomena Viviana Tagliaferri
Ph.D. at the University of Florence, was active first in the United Kingdom as a Visiting Fellow and Research Assistant, and afterwards in Greece as a Postdoctoral Researcher. In the 2011–13 period, she was a visiting scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the Department of Turkish Studies, a research fellow at King’s College London, and a research assistant at Royal Holloway. From 2013 to 2016, she was a research fellow at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (IMS) on Crete, first as Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation fellow, and afterwards as IKY and IPEP Fellow. In 2017, she was awarded an EU major research grant – the Marie Sokolowski-Curie Global Fellowship – for the MedRoute project (http://medroute.eu/) on pluralism in early modern Mediterranean port cities. She was Marie Curie Fellow from 2017 to 2020 at the Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche of Cagliari, Italy (ISEM-CNCR) and at the University of Maryland, College Park.