Gianluca Cinelli and Patrizia Piredda, PI of the MemoGen Project, L’eredita’ della seconda guerra mondiale nella terza generazione, 2026 publication grant for their 2025-26 Memo-AmIt Project.

Gianluca Cinelli, researcher in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature, was a research fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2012-2014. His research interests include war memoirs,
the relationship between history, literature and myth, and the themes of violence and trauma in literature. He has published numerous articles and monographs on Nuto Revelli, Primo Levi, Mario Rigoni Stern, Alessandro Manzoni, Joseph Conrad, Ernst Jünger, Herman Melville, and the cultural memory of WWII. Since 2018 he has been one of the founders and editors of the scholarly journal Close Encounters in War (www.closeencountersinwar.org) and in 2024 he founded with Patrizia Piredda the oral history project MemoGen: The Legacy of the Second World War in the Memory of the Third Generation (1965-1985) (www.memogen3.wordpress.com). In 2025, Gianluca was awarded a Research Grant from the Ragusa Foundation for the Memo AmIt Project, devoted to investigating the legacy of WWII among Italian Americans.

Patrizia Piredda, MA (Literature), MA (Philosophy), MLitt (Philosophy and Literature) and PhD (Philosophy and Literature). In 2018 and 2019 she received the Seal of Excellence Certificate from the European Commission. Her research interests include the philosophy of language, with particular attention to the epistemological role of metaphor, and the relationship between ethics and literature. She has published scientific articles on Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Pirandello, D’Annunzio, Savinio, Levi, Calvino, utopia and dystopia, on metaphors in the media and political discourse on Covid-19 and Quantum Mechanics. Patrizia is currently developing the MemoGen Project
(https://memogen3.wordpress.com/) with Gianluca Cinelli; in 2025, they were awarded a grant from the Ragusa Foundation to develop the Memo-AmIt Project (https://memogen3.wordpress.com/memoamit/). Among her publications: The Great War in Italy (2013); “L’etico non si può insegnare” (2014); La maschera del dandy. Studio estetico su George Bryan Brummell (2017); La riflessione etica nel teatro contemporaneo italiano (2018); Vera Amicitia. Classical Notions of Friendship in Renaissance Thought and Culture (2022).