Advisory board and collaborators

Manuela D’Amore is Full Professor of English Literature and Comparative English Literature at the University of Catania (Italy). She is the author of numerous essays, monographs, and literary translations, with research interests spanning gender studies, travel writing, and migrant literature, primarily from an Anglo-Italian perspective. Her most recent works on these topics include the award-winning The Royal Society and the Discovery of the Two Sicilies: Southern Routes in the Grand Tour (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Literary Voices of the Italian Diaspora in Britain: Time, Transnational Identities and Hybridity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). In contact with leading international research centres focused on the Italian diaspora in major Anglophone countries, she continues to map Italian British authors and works. Her current research focuses on the literary and artistic production of Italian internees on the Isle of Man during World War II.

Elisa Longarato, who lives in Montebello Vicentino, near Vicenza, Italy, started to go through her father’s WWII captivity letters, journals, and memorabilia in 2010, thus discovering that he had been detained as a POW in Zonderwater, South Africa, for more than six years. Since her father Vittorio never talked about his war captivity, in 2011, she traveled to South Africa to visit the Zonderwater camp museum, cemetery, and chapel. Once she returned to Italy, she decided to create a website documenting the Italian POW experience in South Africa with the records that she could through archives and descendants who, like her, wanted to discover more about their relatives’ captivity. Since 2011, she has made available an incredible amount of data and connected with thousands of Italian POWs’ descendants all over the world. http://www.zonderwater.com/en/

Giorgia Magni is a freelance journalist with a degree in Media, Communication, and Performing Arts. She has been collaborating for several years with A.M.P.I.L. (Association for the Memory of Italian Prisoners in Letterkenny), serving as Communications Coordinator and Deputy Director of its Scientific Committee. For the Association, she curated an exhibition exploring the experiences of Italian prisoners of war at the Letterkenny camp in the United States during World War II.

Alan R. Perry is Professor of Italian at Gettysburg College, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His scholarly interests focus upon Italy in World War II, the dopoguerra, and the Cold War. He has investigated the way Italians memorialized fallen partisans and has studied the folklore mystery of Pippo — an aircraft that terrorized the Italian populace in Northern Italy during the war. He has published extensively on Giovannino Guareschi, author of the Don Camillo tales, and, of late, he has written three co-authored, book-length studies on the Italian POW experience in Pennsylvania, 1944 – 1945.

Joanne Tapiolas is an independent researcher, history teacher and high school Deputy Principal, a family historian and business owner. The granddaughter of Catalan (Spanish) and Veneto (Italian) migrants, she has an intimate understanding of displacement, prejudice and living in an unfamiliar world. Her passion for family history and insight into social history has inspired Australians and Italians from around the world, to become part of her projects and share their stories. Her collaboration with independent researchers, authors, journalists and organizations in Australia and Italy has further promoted the history of Italian prisoners of war and internees in Australia during WW2. She is the author of Walking in their Boots, Footprints of Italian Prisoners of War in Queensland WW2 (2017) and the creator of the websites: italianprisonersofwar.com (2018 -); theduneraitalians.com (2025-).