Laurea Filosofia (Università La Sapienza, Roma), Ph.D (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ)

Before moving to Melbourne, I worked in Italy and New Zealand. My areas of research are within modern and contemporary literature and culture with emphasis on crime fiction, popular culture, and literary geographies. I have worked on 20th and 21st  century writing, cultural representations of space, re-interpretation of history in literature and films, and Mediterranean narratives.  I am the author of "Mediterranean Crime Fiction: Transcultural Narratives in and around the 'Great Sea'" (Cambridge University Press, 2024),  "Investigating Italy’s Past through Crime Fiction, Films and TV Series: Murder in the Age of Chaos" (Palgrave McMillan, 2016);  "Politics and Society in Italian Crime Fiction. An Historical Overview "(McFarland,2014) and "The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction. A Bloody Journey" (FDU Press/Rowman&Littlefield, 2102). I have supervised theses on Italian literature and translation studies. I am currently supervising a thesis on the representation of personal and collective identities in graphic novels; and a thesis on the representation of masculinities in Mafia films. I am a chief investigator in the ARC funded project "World Crime Fiction: Making Sense of a Global Genre" (DP 240102250).