Danielle Hipkins

Danielle Hipkins is Professor of Italian Studies and Film at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on gender representation in postwar Italian cinema, and recent articles include ‘Figlie di papà? Adolescent girls between the ‘incest motif’ and female friendship in contemporary Italian film comedy’, The Italianist, 35, 2015, 1-25) and ‘Of postfeminist girls and fireflies: Consuming Rome in Un giorno speciale’, Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies, 50: 1, 2016, 166-182. She was a co-investigator for the AHRC-funded project ‘Italian Cinema Audiences’, focusing on cinema-going in 1950s Italy, with the universities of Bristol and Oxford Brookes (2013-2016). The research team produced the book Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy (Bloomsbury, 2019). Since 2013 she has participated regularly in public events in both Italy and the UK,  that promote debate about the relationship between gender, memory and cinema, working with the ‘Bill Douglas Cinema Musem’ at the University of Exeter and ‘The Exeter Phoenix’ cinema. She has been a Visiting Professor at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles, 2014) and l’Università la Sapienza (Rome, 2018). In 2019 she participated in the videographic workshop Scholarship in Sound & Image at Middlebury College, which led to her interest in the ‘video essay’ form as a means of dissemination. Since 2010 she has co-taught a module on the representation of girlhood in European cinema with her colleague Fiona Handyside. Since February 1st 2021 she has been Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project ‘A Girls’ Eye-view: Girlhood on the Italian Screen since the 1950s’ (2021-2024), together with Romana Andò (Università la Sapienza), through which she continues her research on the relationship between gender and generation in the consumption of Italian cinema and television. Since 2019 she has co-edited the film issue of The Italianist with Elena Past and Monica Seger.

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