Elena Bellina (NYU), Bryan Brazeau (University of Warwick), Beatrice Mazzi (columbia university) for the international project on Italian War Captivity (New York, Venice and Milan).

Elena Bellina is Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Italian Studies at New York University. Her research and publications focus on World War II and captivity studies, cultural memory, and autobiographical writing. She is currently completing “Creativity on Stage behind Barbed Wire: Italian Prisoners of War in Africa,” a book manuscript investigating how WWII Italian Prisoners of War in Africa escaped the trauma of captivity through the performing arts and the sciences, and the English edited translation of “African Adventures: Palmiro Forzini in East Africa (1936-1946).” She is co-editor with Giorgia Alù of Captivity and Creativity: The Cultural and Material Production of Italian Prisoners in Western Allied Hands (1940–1947) (Fordham UP 2026). She is Co-Principal Investigator in the Australian Research Council funded project “Creativity in Captivity in WWII” and DARCI (Digital Atlas of Creativity in Captivity). 

Bryan Brazeau is Academic Director of the Warwick Venice Centre and Associate Professor (Reader) in Liberal Arts at the University of Warwick (UK). His work focuses on early modern Italian and Neo-Latin epic and poetics. He has published on Dante, Torquato Tasso, Jacopo Sannazaro, Lucrezia Marinella, the first English translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the early modern reception of Aristotle’s concept of hamartia, and the Italian surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico in edited collections and in journals such as The Italianist, MLN, History of European Ideas and Renaissance and Reformation. He has edited a volume on new perspectives in the study of early modern poetics: The Reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond (2020). He is currently working on a monograph on the epic corpus of Lucrezia Marinella and a translation of Torquato Tasso’s Lettere poetiche.

Beatrice Mazzi is the Executive Director of Casa Muraro, the Research Center for Venetian Studies of Columbia University and the Director of the Columbia Summer Program in Venice. She holds a PhD in Italian Studies from Columbia University and an MA in Comparative Literature from University College London. Her academic training includes studies in Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and during her doctoral studies she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Utrecht. Her research centers on contemporary Italian literature and cinema, with particular interests in memory studies, nonfiction and documentary practices, oral history, gender studies, and cultural theory. She has taught language, literature, and cinema at Columbia University and at several American and Canadian institutions in Italy, including the University of Oklahoma, McGill University, ISI Florence, and Franklin University Switzerland. She has published articles in journals and magazines devoted to contemporary Italian studies and has contributed to scholarly activities as an editor, peer reviewer and translator. She is currently working on her book manuscript on contemporary testimonial literature in Italy.