Captivity and Creativity: The Cultural and Material Production of Italian Prisoners in Allied Hands (1940-1947) (World War II: the Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension)

Giorgia Alù is Chair of Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Journeys Exposed: Women’s Writing, Mobility, and Photography and co-editor of Enlightening Encounters: Italian Literature and Photography.

Elena Bellina is Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor in Italian Studies at New York University. Her research and publications focus on war and captivity studies, cultural memory, autobiographical writing, and the performing arts.

Catherine Dewhirst is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia. Her research background has focused on the Italian-migrant press and family histories from the age of imperialism to World War II, as well as French women’s autobiographical histories. She has co-edited two books, Transnational Voices of Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press (2020) and Voices of Challenge in Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press (2021), within the “Palgrave Series of the History of the Media” (Palgrave Macmillan). Her current research projects focus on a collaborative project, engaging with the experiences and memories of second- and third-generation Italian Australians whose parents were interned between 1940 and 1945, and the entangled relationship between liberal Italy and editors of the Italian migrant press from the 1880s to the 1920s.

Erika Lorenzon holds a PhD in European Social History for which she completed a thesis on the memories of Italian POWs in Allied and German hands. Her research centers on autobiographical writing and the popular memory and memorialization of World War II and imprisonment experiences. Her publications include the groundbreaking monograph Lo sguardo lontano. L’Italia della seconda Guerra mondiale nella memoria dei prigionieri di guerra (2018), the edited volume Cronistorie di guerra. Le relazioni dei parroci della diocesi di Treviso (1939–1945) (2015), and many essays on Italian military prisoners and internees. Since the early 2000s, she has collaborated with Istituto per la Storia della Resistenza e della Società Contemporanea della Marca Trevigiana, for which she has curated and led research projects on World War II Resistance in the Veneto region, including Roldo Marconato e gli internati militari italiani for the podcast series on The Resistance in the Treviso province.

Flavia Marcello is a writer, Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University of Technology, and an Affiliate of the University of Sydney. She is a world expert on the architecture and cultural production of the Italian Fascist period. Her areas of research include exhibitions, architectural ephemera, spatial practice, the political uses of the classical tradition, manifestations of Fascist and anti-Fascist ideology in monuments and public space. She is author of two books: Giuseppe Pagano. Design for Social Change in Fascist Italy (2020) and After the Fall: The Legacy of Fascism in Rome’s Architectural and Urban History (2024). She is Co-Principal Investigator of the Australian Research Council project on “Mapping Creativity in Captivity during WWII” and is currently working on a work of historical fiction about an Italian prisoner of war.