Project members

Giorgia Alù (The University of Sydney) is the Lead Chief Investigator of the project. She is an accomplished Italian scholar whose work intersects literary studies, cultural and visual studies, and Italian cultural and social history. She has contributed to numerous projects and publications that explore photographic culture, travel, migration, and war and the transcultural relationship between words and images. Her recent research delves into the ethical and emotional dimensions of photographs and other texts, particularly in transnational contexts of exclusion, exploitation, and confinement affecting both human and non-human subjects. She is also Chief Investigator in the ARC DP project Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia.

Elena Bellina is Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor at New York University in the Department of Italian Studies. Her research and publications focus on war and captivity studies, cultural memory, autobiographical writing, music, and gender studies. She is currently completing two book manuscripts on the literary and artistic production by WWII Italian prisoners of war detained in Africa based on the unpublished memoirs and diaries that she discovered at the National Diary Archive (Arezzo, Italy). The first book manuscript, Creativity on Stage Behind Barbed Wire: Italian POWs in Africa, investigates how Italian POWs in Africa systematically escaped the trauma of captivity through literature and the performing arts by writing poetry and novels, reading Dante and Machiavelli, writing and staging plays, opera productions, and musical theatre. Her second book, African Adventures: Palmiro Forzini in East Africa (1936–1946), is a critical edition and translation of Avventura Africana, a two-volume memoir in which the author chronicles his decade in Africa. She has co-edited two books on violence and the performing arts. In 2019, she was a Lauro De Bosis Fellow in the History of Modern Italy at Harvard University.

Flavia Marcello is Adjunct Professor of Architecture at Swinburne University and was the 2022 Balsdon Fellow at the British School in Rome. She is a world expert on the art, architecture and design of the Italian Fascist and post-war periods and has published in The Conversation, written exhibition catalogues essays as well as numerous academic articles for edited books and leading journals. Her research delves into the politics of monuments and public space, the legacy of Fascism in contemporary society and the creative outputs of Italian prisoners of war in Australia during World War II. She is author of two books: a monograph on Italian-Istrian architect Giuseppe Pagano-Pogatschnig that looks at the relationship between design and social change (Intellect, 2020) and the legacy of Fascism in contemporary Rome (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Laura E. Ruberto is Professor of Humanities (Berkeley City College), Mellon Foundation/ACLS Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. Her research revolves around material culture, oral histories, vernacular culture, and film within Italian diaspora and transnational contexts. Her interdisciplinary expertise includes work around unpacking the impact of Italian ethnic presences within public spaces, influences of Italian cinema transnationally, the development of the notion of Italian style through migration, the rethinking of standard narratives around Italian migration histories, the role of memorialization, and the way memory-work functions to create and support community identities within and against dominant narratives. Beyond numerous book chapters and journal articles she has the authored Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy and the U.S. (2007). She is also the co-editor of: Italy, Monuments, and Migrations (2022), Pasquale Stiso’s “True Story” and Other Works (2021), Borderless Italy/Italia senza frontiere (2020), New Italian Migrations to the United States, Volumes 1 and 2 (2017), Italian Americans and Television (2016), and Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (2007). As part of this ARC project, she is investigating the creative works by Italian prisoners of war who were brought to the United States.

Rebecca Suter is Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway, and honorary professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at the University of Sydney. Her research spans modern Japanese literature and comparative literature, Japanese history, multiculturalism, and transnationalism. Her most recent research examines the representation of Southern and Northern European countries in modern and contemporary Japanese literature and popular culture, focusing on how they are portrayed and perceived as simultaneously charmingly exotic and reassuringly familiar places. For the DARCI project, her focus is on the experience of Italian civilian internees in Den’en chofu and Nagoya in the period between 1943 and 1945.

Anthony White (University of Melbourne) writes about the history of modern and contemporary art. He is the author of Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism (2020) and Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (2011), and the co-author (with Tristen Harwood and Grace McQuilten) of Variations: A More Diverse Picture of Contemporary Art (2023) and (with Grace McQuilten) ofArt as Enterprise: Social and Economic Engagement in Contemporary Art (2016). He has published in the peer-reviewed journals Grey Room and October; curated exhibitions including Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (National Gallery of Australia, 2002); and received awards from the Australian Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Eleonora Cerqua was born and raised in Rome. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of Technology of Sydney. Her research focuses on the grassroots urban regeneration of a 19th-century fort in Rome, which was involved in World War II events and has functioned as a self-managed, occupied social centre since 1986. Her background as an archaeologist and historical researcher has enhanced her investigation, while her grandfather, an IMI (Italian Military Internee), ignited her passion for WWII.

Dr Daria Gradusova is a researcher in the field of cultural heritage and museums. She was awarded doctorates from Swinburne University of Technology and the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy. Her doctoral research investigated the concept of authenticity in museum curatorial practices and visitor experiences, as well as exhibition design practices. Previously, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to complete her Master of Fine Arts in Exhibition Planning and Design at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. She started her journey in cultural heritage and museums by studying a degree in Conservation of Books and Graphics at the Saint Petersburg State University, and worked for the Russian Academy of Sciences restoring books and documents.