Dr Catherine O'Rawe

• Email: c.g.orawe@bris.ac.uk
• Telephone: 0117 3316760
• Research Publications

Catherine O’Rawe graduated from Oxford with a BA in English and Italian. She completed an MA in Italian at the University of Toronto, and a PhD (2001) at Cambridge on the narrative of Luigi Pirandello. She was Lecturer in Italian at the University of Exeter from 2001 to 2004, and at the University of Leeds from Sept 2004-Jan 2007.

Research

Her principal research area is Italian cinema, focusing in particular on the relations between neo-realist cinema (and Italian film culture more generally) and Hollywood, and on the question of gender and neo-realism. She  is currently working on a monograph on the dialogue between Italian cinema and Hollywood: through a series of case studies, it will examine the contested relation between neo-realism and Hollywood cinema,  in the form of US co-productions, the casting of Hollywood stars, and the borrowing of Hollywood generic and star conventions. This interest in the cultural and aesthetic exchange between Hollywood and European cinema has also given rise to a successful interdisciplinary and collaborative research project on the transmission of the figure of the femme fatale. Further ongoing collaboration includes the co-organisation of a seminar series on ‘Thinking Italian Film’, resulting in a special issue of Italian Studies devoted to this topic in October 2008. A further and ongoing area of research is Sicilian literature, where she has published a monograph on the narrative of Luigi Pirandello, and articles on constructions of the Sicilian landscape in the work of Consolo and Bufalino.

Selected Publications

Book:

Authorial Echoes: Textuality and Self-Plagiarism in the Narrative of Luigi Pirandello (Oxford: Legenda, 2005).

Edited Books:

The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts, edited with Helen Hanson (Palgrave, 2010).

Edited Journal Issues:

Special Issue of Italian Studies (vol 62:1) on ‘Thinking Italian Film, co-edited with Alan O’Leary

Articles:

'In Search of Italian Cinema Audiences in the 1940s and 1950s: Gender, genre and national identity', co-authored with Danielle Hipkins and Daniela Treveri Gennari, in Participations, Volume 8, Issue 2, November 2011

'Against realism: on a ‘certain tendency’ in Italian film criticism', in Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16:1 (2011), 107-28 (co-authored with Alan O'Leary).

‘More More Moro: Music and Montage in Romanzo criminale’, in The Italianist, film issue, 29:2(2009), 214-226.

‘“I padri e i maestri”: Genre, Auteurs, and Absences in Italian Film Studies’, Italian Studies, 63: 2, pp. 173-94.

 ‘Mapping Sicilian Literature: Place and Text in Consolo and Bufalino’, in Italian Studies, 62:1 (2007), 79-94.

 ‘In Search of an Author: Pirandello and the Poetics of Biography’, in Modern Language Review, 101:4 (2006), 992-1004.

Chapters in Books:

‘Roberta Torre’s Angela: the Mafia and the “Woman’s Film”, forthcoming in Mafia Movies: a Reader, ed. by Dana Renga (University of Toronto Press).

‘Gender and Genre: Noir, Neo-realism and Fatality in Italian Cinema’, forthcoming in The Femme Fatale, ed. by Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe (Palgrave, 2009)

‘From Pirandello to MGM: Hollywood Reads European Literature’, in Dialogues with Hollywood: World Cinema’s Relationship with American Film Culture, edited by Paul Cooke (Palgrave, 2007), pp. 69-85.

Recent Reviews:

Review of Gian Piero Brunetta, The History of Italian Film from its Origins to the Twenty-First Century (2009), in Reviews in History.

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