Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics
Raised Faculty Building
University of Cambridge
Sidgwick Avenue
Cambridge
CB3 9DA
United Kingdom
In 2013 Erica received her BA in Italian Literature from Università degli Studi di Catania with a thesis on Paolo Volponi’s Le mosche del capitale. She then moved to Venice, where she completed her MA in Italian Philology and Literature in 2016, with a thesis concerning thresholds, margins and exile in Paolo Volponi’s prose and poetry.
Between 2015 and 2016, Erica spent six months in Paris, at Université Paris Nanterre, as part of an Erasmus+ programme.
In 2017, she started her PhD at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, supervised by Prof Robert S. C. Gordon and fully funded by a Keith Sykes Postgraduate Research Scholarship (three years). In July 2021, she defended her doctoral thesis, concerning some intersections between Italian industrial literature of the 1950s and 1960s and anticolonialism.
Thanks to an MHRA postdoctoral research scholarship, she is now working towards the publication of her PhD as a monograph (Legenda). She also contributes to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in the Faculty as an affiliated lecturer (IT1/ITA3, IT4, IT5, IT6). She is the paper coordinator for IT4 and IT6.
Since 2021, Erica has offered undergraduate lectures and postgraduate seminars on several topics as part of the papers IT4, IT6, IT9 and MPhil module IT20th Century: New Commitments. In particular, she has taught the following modules:
- IT1/ITA3: Postcolonial Italian Literature: Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Lontano da Mogadiscio
- IT4: Primo Levi; Contemporary Women’s Autobiography: Luisa Passerini and Igiaba Scego
- IT5: Carlo Levi’s South(s) (co-taught with Dr Michele Maiolani)
- IT9 & IT6: ‘Italian Photo-texts After 1945’
- IT6: ‘Transnational Italy’ (co-taught with Mr Luigi Pinton)
- IT6: ‘Italian Industrial Literature and Film
- ITA1: Italian Language Supplementary Classes
- Two sessions of IT20th century: New Commitments, on ‘The Long 1960s’ and ‘Italian Colonialism, Anticolonialism and Postcolonialism’
For all these modules, Erica has also supervised essays, long essays as well as optional dissertations. In addition, she has supervised students for Italian Oral B and for the IT1/ITA3 paper, on topics such as Dante, Vittoria Colonna, Machiavelli, Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso, Giotto and La dolce vita.
Erica's doctoral thesis investigates intersections between Italian industrial literature of the 1950s and 1960s and the anticolonial thought which in the same years circulated around Europe and was enthusiastically received in Italy by industrial writers. In particular, she proposes an anticolonial reading of Italian industrial literature of those years based on a conceptual analogy between industrialisation in Italy and a colonial process.
Her research interests also include:
- Italian post-war literature and cultural history
- Industrial literature and the relationships between literature and labour
- Modernism and Neo-Modernism
- Transnational Italian Studies
- Colonial, Anticolonial and Postcolonial Italy
During her academic path, Erica also developed a parallel interest in Anglo-American Literature (Ca’ Foscari-Harvard Summer School, Venice, June-July 2014).
Erica is currently developing a research project on the reception of African and African American Literatures in Italy in the years of the Cold War.
She is currently part of the OBERT working group on Migration and Labour, which she contributed to found and which looks at artistic representations of migration and labour in world literature and art of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Peer-reviewed journal articles:
- ‘“Come il lavoro dei corallai”: note sui contributi di Leonardo Sciascia a Galleria’, Todomodo, 11 (2021), 217–228
- ‘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
- ‘“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
- ‘“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
- ‘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
- ‘“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
- ‘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), pp. 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
