Wandering Women: Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking explores the work of contemporary Italian women directors from feminist and ecological perspectives. Professor Di Bianco will be in conversation with Professor of Italian at Wayne State, Elena Past.

This event is sponsored by the Humanities Institute at JHU.

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Laura Di Bianco is an Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Italian Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where she is affiliated faculty member at the Center for Advanced Media Studies (CAMS), and collaborator with the Programs for the Study of Women’s Gender and Sexuality (WGS), and Environmental Science and Studies. 

Her first book, Wandering Women. Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking (Indiana University Press, 2023), investigates the work of contemporary Italian women directors from a feminist and ecocritical perspectives. Supported by the Lauro De Bosis Fellowship at Harvard University, and the Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award, she is currently developing a second book project on Italian cinema and ecology: Crumbling Beauty: Italian Cinema in the Anthropocene. 

Prior to her PhD studies, Laura worked at Italy’s national film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, as an iconographic researcher and curator for photo exhibitions and publications, and as production coordinator for numerous film projects including the documentary film series Ritratti italiani – Archivio della memoria (Italian Portraits Memory Archive) and Mestieri del cinema (Cinema Ars and Craft).

Elena Past is Associate Dean of the Irvin D. Reid Honors College and Professor of Italian at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. In 2022, she was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (2021-22) and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar (2022). Her books include Italian Cinema Beyond the Human (2019), winner of the Modern Language Association’s Howard R. Marraro Prize; Methods of Murder: Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction (2012); and the co-edited collections Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies: Italy and the Environmental Humanities (with Serenella Iovino and Enrico Cesaretti, 2018) and Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film (with Deborah Amberson, 2014). She is currently and co-editor of The Italianist Film Issue with Danielle Hipkins and Monica Seger. Her research interests include environmental media studies, animal studies, posthumanism, and Italian film studies. elenapast@wayne.edu   

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