Dr Erica Bellia

Churchill College
  • Gulbenkian Early-Career Research Fellow in Italian (Churchill College)
  • Affiliated Lecturer
  • Supervisor
Dr Erica Bellia

Contact

Location

  • Churchill College, Storey's Way, CB3 0DS

About

In 2013, I received a BA in Italian Literature from Università degli Studi di Catania with a thesis on Paolo Volponi’s Le mosche del capitale. I then moved to Venice, where I completed an 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, I spent six months in Paris, at Université Paris Nanterre, as part of an Erasmus+ programme.

In 2017, I started a PhD in Italian 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, I defended my doctoral thesis, 'Industrial Writing and Anticolonial Discourse in Italy, 1955–1965', concerning some 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. 

Thanks to an MHRA postdoctoral research scholarship that I was awarded in 2022–2023, I recently submitted the manuscript of my first monograph, growing out of my PhD, to the Legenda series 'Italian Perspectives' (working title: The Colonial Allegory: Narratives of Industry and Decolonisation in Italy, 1955–1965'). Since my PhD, I have contributed to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and to the organisation of research events in the Faculty.

Between September and December 2023, I was a fellow (Rome Awardee) at the British School at Rome, where I had the opportunity to work on a project entitled Black Rome: The Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists (Rome, March-April 1959). In June 2024, I co-organised with Luca Peretti a workshop on the Rome Congress at KNIR, in Rome: The Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, 65 years later.

Together with Liesbeth François (Spanish), in 2024 I was a convenor of the Narratives of Unpaid Labour seminar series: https://www.mmll.cam.ac.uk/rights-wrongs-prison-work-italy-experiential-narratives-cultural-representations-monica-jansen.

In 2024-25 I was a Teaching Associate in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature and Culture.

Thanks to a Gulbenkian Early-Career Research Fellowship at Churchill College, I am currently working on a research project on anthologies of African, African-American and Afro-Diasporic literatures published in Italy from 1945 to the present: https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/fellows/dr-erica-bellia/

 

Teaching interests: 

Since 2021, I have offered undergraduate lectures and postgraduate seminars on several topics as part of the following papers:

  • IT1/ITA3: Postcolonial Italian Literature: Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Lontano da Mogadiscio
  • IT3: Italian Cinema
  • IT4: Primo Levi; Contemporary Women’s Autobiography: Luisa Passerini and Igiaba Scego
  • IT5: Carlo Levi’s South(s) (co-taught with Dr Michele Maiolani in 2022-2023)
  • IT9 & IT6: ‘Italian Photo-texts After 1945’
  • IT6: ‘Transnational Italy’ (co-taught with Dr Luigi Pinton in 2021-2022 and 2022-2023)
  • IT6: ‘Italian Industrial Literature and Film' (co-taught with Prof. Pierpaolo Antonello in 2021-2022); '"Fondata sul lavoro": Labour Narratives in Postwar Italy'
  • ITA1: Italian Language Supplementary Classes
  • ITB1
  • Two sessions of IT20th century: New Commitments, on ‘The Long 1960s’ and ‘Italian Colonialism, Anticolonialism and Postcolonialism’

For all these modules, I have also supervised essays, long essays as well as optional dissertations.

Research

Research interests: 

My 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 my academic path, I have also developed a parallel interest in Anglo-American Literature (Ca’ Foscari-Harvard Summer School, Venice, June-July 2014).

 

Recent research projects: 

I am currently working on a research project on anthologies of African, African-American and Afro-Diasporic literatures published in Italy from 1945 to the present: https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/fellows/dr-erica-bellia/

I am part of the OBERT (Observatoire Européen des Récits du Travail - European Observatory of Labour Narratives), in which I contributed to found a working group on Migration and Labour, looking at artistic representations of migration and labour in world literature and art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

 

Published works: 

FORTHCOMING

Monograph:

  •  Narratives of Industry and Decolonisation in Italy 1955-1965: An Allegorical Reading (Legenda, 2025)

IN PREPARATION

  • Erica Bellia, 'Like a Congress of Italian Socialists': The Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in the Italian Periodical Press (journal article)

PUBLISHED

Peer-reviewed journal articles:

  •  Erica Bellia, ‘Striking Women in Italian Industrial Literature of the Economic Miracle’, Women Language Literature in Italy, special issue co-edited by Serena Laiena and Elena Emma Sottilotta, 2024
  • Erica Bellia, ‘Sciascia e il montaggio di scritture altrui’, Todomodo: A Journal of Sciascia Studies, 14 (2024)
  • 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), 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

Teaching and supervision

Course contact for: 

IT6 - Topics in Modern Italian Culture

IT4- Autobiography and Self-Representation in Italian Culture