Dr Erica Bellia 

Erica Bellia is a Gulbenkian Early-Career Research Fellow in the Arts and Humanities (Italian Studies)at Churchill College, Cambridge. She is currently working on a comparative research project entitled Anthologising Blackness in Post-Fascist Italy and looking at anthologies of Black Literature translated and/or published in Italy from 1945 to the present. This project aims to use the anthology format as a lens to consider the importance of Black Literature in 20^th– and 21^st-century Italy.

After a BA in Modern Literature from University of Catania and an MA in Italian Philology and Literature from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in 2021 Erica obtained a PhD in Italian from Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, with a thesis on industrial writing and anticolonial discourse in Italy, 1955-1965. Thanks to an MHRA scholarship, she has been reworking her thesis to publish it as a monograph (expected submission January 2024, Legenda).

Erica’s research focus is on 20th- and 21^st-century Italian culture. Her work so far has positioned itself at the intersection of two fields of inquiry: the study of labour narratives and the investigation of Italian colonial, anticolonial and postcolonial experiences from a transnational perspective. Her projects aim to bridge these two areas and contribute to both. However, her research interests also include Italian Periodical Studies, Neomodernism, Leonardo Sciascia, the reception and production of African and African American literatures in Europe, among other lines of inquiry, which she has pursued in different ways. For example, she was recently awarded a three-month fellowship by the British School at Rome to work on the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists (Rome, March-April 1959).

Since 2018, she has contributed to teaching in the Italian Section at Cambridge, as a supervisor (ITA3, IT4, IT5, IT6, Oral B) and then as an affiliated lecturer, paper coordinator and temporary Director of Studies for Italian at St John’s College. She has designed and delivered undergraduate and postgraduate modules and sessions on Italian industrial literature and film, transnational Italy, Italian photo-texts after 1945, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s Lontano da Mogadiscio, Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli and she has contributed to teaching modules on Primo Levi, women’s autobiography, as well as Italian language.

Erica is an active member of the ObERT committee (Observatoire Européen des Récits du Travail), which organises and co-ordinates research events and initiatives relating to labour narratives. She also collaborates with Todomodo: A Journal of Sciascia Studies.

Academia page: https://cambridge.academia.edu/EricaBellia

Faculty page: https://www.mmll.cam.ac.uk/eb692

Publications

IN PREPARATION

Monograph:

• The Colonial Allegory: Literary and Cinematic Narratives of Industry and Decolonization in Italy, 1955–1965: proposal approved for publication in the Legenda series ‘Italian Perspectives’ (expected submission: January 2024)

PUBLISHED

Peer-reviewed journal articles:

• Erica Bellia, ‘“Come il lavoro dei corallai”: note sui contributi di Leonardo Sciascia a Galleria’, Todomodo, 11 (2021), 217–228
• Erica Bellia, ‘Colonizzati o colonizzatori? L’anticolonialismo olivettiano sulle pagine di Comunità, 1954–1964’, in Umanesimo e tecnologia: il laboratorio Olivetti, ed. by Daniele Balicco (special issue of L’ospite ingrato, n.s., 6 (2021)), pp. 89-97
• Erica Bellia, ‘“Tradire la propria condizione”: rappresentazioni dell’intellettuale nell’opera di Paolo Volponi’, Il lavoro della letteratura: forme, temi, metafore di un conflitto occultato e di un’emancipazione a venire, special issue of L’ospite ingrato, online edition, 2018, 259–280
• Erica Bellia, ‘“Sugli scalini di una casa altrui”: soglie, margini, esilio in Memoriale di Paolo Volponi’, Studi Novecenteschi, 94 (2017), 341–363

Book chapters:

• Erica Bellia, ‘Algeria: anno settimo. Note su un documentario ritrovato’, book chapter, in Con le mani libere: il cinema italiano e la liberazione dell’Algeria, ed. by Luca Peretti and Paola Scarnati (Arcidosso, GR: Effigi, 2022), pp. 163–178
• Erica Bellia, “Noi siamo tutti colonizzati dalla tecnica”: riviste industriali e pensiero anticolonialista nell’Italia degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta’, book chapter, in Fabrica in fabula: industria ed editoria culturale nel Novecento, a cura di Silvia Cavalli, Davide Savio and Carmen Van den Bergh (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2022), pp. 139–148
• Erica Bellia, ‘Tommaso Di Ciaula’s Tuta blu (1978): The Voice and Body of the Working Class’, book chapter, in Italian Industrial Literature and Film: Perspectives on the Representation of Postwar Labor, ed. by Carlo Baghetti, Jim Carter and Lorenzo Marmo (Bern: Peter Lang, 2021), pp. 349–358
• Erica Bellia, ‘“La città materna”: Urbino nel Lanciatore di Giavellotto di Paolo Volponi’, book chapter, in Idee, forme e racconto della città nella narrativa italiana (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2020), pp. 39–47
• Erica Bellia, ‘Viaggio in Barberia di Luciano Bianciardi: appunti per una teoria dell’anti-viaggio?’, book chapter, in ‘Un viaggio realmente avvenuto’: studi in onore di Ricciarda Ricorda, ed. by Alessandro Cinquegrani and Ilaria Crotti (Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2019), 345–354

Translations (English to Italian)

• David Forgacs, ‘Italiani in Algeri’, trans. by Erica Bellia, in Con le mani libere: il cinema italiano e la liberazione dell’Algeria, ed. by Luca Peretti and Paola Scarnati (Arcidosso, GR: Effigi, 2022), pp. 99–120
• Viviane Saglier, ‘”Un mondo completamente nuovo in cui molte cose rimasero uguali”. La rappresentazione delle donne in Les mains livres’, trans. by Erica Bellia, in Con le mani libere: il cinema italiano e la liberazione dell’Algeria, ed. by Luca Peretti and Paola Scarnati (Arcidosso, GR: Effigi, 2022), pp. 233–248