Postgraduate profiles in Italian

Mauro Fornasiero

Mauro graduated from the Universitą Cattolica, Milan, in 2002 with a thesis on contemporary art history: ‘L’autoritratto fotografico: tra identitą mentale e corporea - casi esemplari degli ultimi decenni’. He further explored the concept of identity and the diseased body in a thesis entitled ‘Derek Jarman’s The Garden: A contextualized case study of intra-communitarian representations of people with AIDS’, which led to the award of an MPhil from the University of Birmingham in 2006.At Bristol, he is currently working towards a PhD on the representations of HIV/AIDS in Italian popular and literary culture under the supervision of Prof. Derek Duncan.

He has collaborated with the Veneto Region’s Centre for Health Promotion, in Verona, on an EU public heath project, SIALON: ‘Capacity Building in HIV/Syphilis prevalence estimation using non-invasive methods among MSM’. In January 2009 he joined GLOB.I._Lab (Laboratorio su globalizzazione, identitą e pluralismo culturale), a research group coordinated by Prof. G. Guizzardi in the Department of Sociology at the University of Padua.

Published translations:

Castoro, Carlo, et al., Policy Brief: la day surgery e la sua attuazione (forthcoming)

Roseneil, Sasha, ‘Vivere ed amare oltre i confini della normativitą
eterosessuale. Le relazioni personali nel XXI secolo’, in Luca Trappolin
(ed.), Per una sociologia dell’omossessualitą (Roma: Carrocci, 2008),
pp.173-181

Sue Hartley

Sue came to the University of Bristol as a mature student, having retired early from her job as Head of Marketing Communications at one of the big four banks. She graduated in 2006 with a first class BA Honours degree in Italian. Having chosen to write her final year dissertation on women and work in fifteenth century Florence, she decided to progress to postgraduate research into other areas related to this theme. She was granted funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a Master of Philosophy degree, which she undertook to do part time, under the supervision of Professor Judith Bryce. Her subject was ‘Writing Motherhood’: A Study of the Letters of Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi to Her Sons, 1447-1470. Her particular interest was the self-representational aspect of the text: how Alessandra exploited her maternal role to gain authority in her patriarchal society, and motherhood itself as a cultural and social construct. She was awarded her degree in 2009. She spends much of her time in Italy, and is currently writing a book on her experiences of life in that country. She also does translation work, ranging from academic books and articles, to books of more general public interest.

Caroline Lynch

Caroline graduated from University College Cork, Ireland, in 2003 with a first class honours BA in Language Culture Studies (Italian and English). In 2005 she graduated with distinction from Cardiff University with an MA in European Studies. Here her specialization was in European Literature with her dissertation focusing on the remembering, forgetting and representing of traumatic war experiences in Primo Levi’s I sommersi e i salvati and Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur. Caroline is currently working towards her PhD at Bristol. Her research focuses on the various ways in which memories of the female Second World War experience have been articulated, recorded and transmitted by Italian women from the rise of the women’s movement to the present. She is particularly interested in whether the expression of these memories — be they literary, oral, filmic or autobiographical — can be regarded as constituting an alternative female historiography of the Second World War. She is supervised by Dr Charles Burdett and Dr Ruth Glynn and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Elisabetta Tesser

Elisabetta’s first degree was in Lingue e lettere moderne at the Cą Foscari in Venice. Her tesi di laurea was entitled ‘Comunicacion social y politica en los carteles cubantos posrevolucionarios’ (2002). In 2007 she was awarded a Masters in teaching Italian as a foreign language at the University of Padua. She has had a wide variety of study and work experience at universities in Spain, Mexico and Uruguay, and in Turkey. As well as language teaching she also operates as a freelance translator and in on-line publishing. She is currently studying for a Masters in Bristol on representations of travel in post-war Italian cinema. She holds a Faculty of Arts Open Scholarship Award.