Bernadette Luciano, Professor of Italian and European Studies at the University of Auckland.
Much of my academic work has focused on women writers and filmmakers and gender related issues. I have published in the areas of cinema and documentary studies; film adaptation; women’s autobiographical writing; the theory and practice of translation and subtitling; and issues of identity, migration and transnationalism in literature and film. My interest in girlhood studies focuses primarily on contemporary films and documentaries and their representations of adolescent and pre-adolescent girls who resist boundaries imposed by institutions and society and attempt to claim agency and control over their bodies and their lives. I am particularly interested in the tensions that arise in these narratives: between mobility and stasis and between transgression and conformity as well as in the role of place and space (geographical, cultural and linguistic spaces and spaces of confinement, surveillance and reform) in advancing the narratives.
In terms of content, I am interested in the various forms of transformative encounters explored in the films’ narratives and in the affective power of these films.
Relevant Publications:
2013 LUCIANO, B., SCARPARO, S. Reframing Italy: Trends in Contemporary Italian Women’s Filmmaking. Purdue: Purdue University Press. 300pp.
2008 LUCIANO, B. The Cinema of Silvio Soldini: Dream, Image, Voyage. Troubador. 200pp.
2019 LUCIANO, B. “The Last Mother: From Enrico Pau’s L’accabadora (2015) to Valeria Golino’s Miele (2013)”, Italianistica Debreceniensis, v. 24, 85-95.
2011 LUCIANO, B and SCARPARO, S. “I bambini si guardano: the documentaries of Costanza Quatriglio.” Studies in Documentary Film, 5.2&3: 183-196.
2010 LUCIANO, B and SCARPARO, S. “‘Vite sospese’: Representing Female Migration in Contemporary Italian Documentaries.” Italian Studies 65.2: 192-203.
2010 LUCIANO, B and SCARPARO, S. “Gendering Mobility and Migration in Contemporary Italian cinema.”Italianist, 30: 165-182.
2010 LUCIANO, B and SCARPARO, S. “The Personal is still Political: Films ‘by and for women’ by the new documentariste.” Italica, 87.3: 487-502.
2006 LUCIANO, B and SCARPARO, S. “Back to the Future:The Comencini Sisters’ and their Search for a Cinematic Language.” Studies in European Cinema, 4.2: 37-`49.
Relevant unpublished papers and works in progress:
“Girls on the Run: Gender, mobility and spaces of resistance in contemporary Italian cinema”
“Gender Identity and Translingual/Transcultural Encounters in Laura Bispuri’s Vergine giurata”
“Costanza Quatriglio’s Triangle: Voices from the Rubble”
