UTOPIA

Professors

Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900 (paperback, 2009), and theco-author,with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has edited Looking Backward for Oxford World Classics.

Dame Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and was President of Clare Hall College for a seven year term, 1994-2001. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature and is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an International Member of the American Philosophical Society. She was made Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 1998 for services to English literature. She has twice judged the Booker Prize for fiction and is particularly interested in contemporary literature, working now on the Board of the Writers' Centre Norwich and on the Council of Arts Council England East. Among her Honorary Doctorates are those from London and Oxford Universities, and the Sorbonne. She is President of the British Science and Literature Society and is General Editor of the series Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture. Her books include George Eliot (1986), Arguing with the Past (1989), Darwin's Plots (1983; 2000; 2009), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996), Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996). More recently she has published a number of essays>on Thomas Hardy and on Modernist writing. She is at present finishing a study of Lewis Carroll's Alice books in the context of nineteenth-century intellectual controversies and is editing a complete edition of Carroll's poems for Penguin. She has also published a series of essays on rhyming and gave the Poetry Society Annual Lecture in 2007 on 'Rhyming as Intimacy, Rhyming as Radicalism'. Darwin remains a primary interest.

Roberto Bigazzi is professor of Italian Literature at the University of Siena and co-director of the European School for Comparative Studies “Synapsis”. He has written on Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, the relations between narrative and historiography (editing I racconti di Clio: tecniche narrative della storiografia, Pisa 1989), modern and contemporary Italian novel. His books include I colori del vero and Su Verga novelliere, Pisa 1969 and 1975, Fenoglio: personaggi e narratori, Roma 1983, Le risorse del romanzo, Pisa 1996, Beppe Fenoglio (forthcoming, October 2010).  He has edited  two 19th century writers, Storielle Vane by C. Boito (Firenze 1971), L’eredità Ferramonti by G. C. Chelli (Torino 1972), then Torrismondo by Torquato Tasso (Torino 1977), and one of the masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance historiography: Storia fiorentina by Benedetto Varchi (3 voll., Roma 2003). 

Laura Caretti is Professor of History of Theatre and the Performing Arts at the University of Siena, where she is also Director of the PhD programme on "Comparatistica: letteratura, teatro, cinema" and co-director of the European School  "Synapsis".  She is a life member of Clare Hall College (Cambridge). In her teaching she combines theory and theatre practice. She has written mainly on Shakespeare in performance and on modern and contemporary theatre, focusing on the art of actors and directors, on adaptations, on the interaction between theatre and cinema. Her books and essays include: Il teatro del personaggio: Shakespeare sulla scena italiana dell’Ottocento, 1979; Fair Youths, Dark Ladies or Fools: Snapshots of Shakespearean Actresses, in The Renaissance Revisited, 1992; Rosmer's House of Shadows, in Ibsen im europäischen Spannungsfeld zwischen Naturalismus und Symbolismus, 1998; Close-ups on Women Directing Hedda Gabler, in Proceedings IX International Ibsen Conference, Bergen 2001; Incanti e sortilegi, streghe nella storia, nel teatro e nel cinema, Pisa 2002; Tragedie a lieto fine, in Memoria di Shakespeare, 2004; Quien soy yo? Quienes son ellos/as? Personajes en busca de identidad , Arbor (Madrid), 2006;  Winnie's Italian Stage, in The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett, 2009; transl. M.Shelley, Frankenstein, (new ed., illustrated by B. Wrightson), 2010.

Gioachino Chiarini (nato a Venezia, 1945) insegna Letteratura latina nella Facoltà  di Lettere e Filosofia dell'Università  di Siena. Dirige il Centro Warburg Italia di Siena. Si occupa di teatro classico (da ricordare le monografie La recita. Plauto, la farsa, la festa, Bologna, Patron, 1992; e Introduzione a Plauto, Roma/Bari, Laterza, 1991); di storia della cultura classica (Lessing e Plauto, Napoli, Liguori, 1983); di poesia epica e di storia della narrativa (Odisseo. Il labirinto marino, Roma, Képos, 1992, e l’antologia Cosmos. Itinerari nell’epica classica, Milano, Bruno Mondadori, 1998). Con M.Bettini e altri ha scritto La letteratura latina. Storia letteraria e antropologia romana, Firenze, La Nuova Italia 1995. Oltre a contare su una ricca produzione ospitata da riviste italiane e straniere, svolge attività di traduttore: Orosio, Storie contro i pagani (libri V-VII, Milano, Mondadori/Lorenzo Valla 1976); Atti dei martiri (ibid. 1987), Sant'Agostino, Confessioni  (in 5 voll., ibid. 1992-1997); G.E. Lessing, Il giovane erudito (Pisa, ETS, 1992); Plauto, Casina (Roma, Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1992); Catullo, Poesie (Milano, Frassinelli, 1996); sta traducendo le Mertamorfosi di Ovidio per la Fondazione L. Valla. Nell’ambito delle simbologie nastronomiche in letteratura da segnalare: I cieli del mito. Letteratura e cosmo da Omero ad Ovidio (Diabasis, Reggio Emilia, 2005), Igino, Mitologia astrale, Adelphi 2009  (in collaborazione con Giulio Guidorizzi) e in corso di pubblicazione il saggio Orfeo allo specchio. Ermetismo e alchimia nella Cappella di Santa Caterina in SanDomenico di Siena (in Quaderni Warburg Italia, III).

Simona Corso is lecturer in English literature at the Comparative Literature Department of the University of Rome – Roma Tre. Her research interests include Eighteenth Century English literature, Shakespeare, Postcolonial Studies, narratology, literature and cinema. Her publications include Postcolonial Shakespeare (edited by M. d’Amico and S. Corso, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2009), Letteratura e Antropologia (edited by M. Bonafin and S. Corso, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2008), Automi, termometri, fucili. L'immaginario della macchina nel romanzo inglese e francese del Settecento (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), articles on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, Martin Amis, Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, and works of thematic criticism. She writes for L’Indice, Leggendaria, Stilos, l’immaginazione. Her novel Capodanno al Tennis Club (Sellerio, 2002) was awarded the Premio Mondello Opera Prima in 2003.

Laurent Darbellay est maître-assistant de littérature française et de cinéma au Département de Langue et Littérature Françaises Modernes de l’Université de Genève depuis 2004. Il a également enseigné à Yale, ainsi qu’aux universités de Lausanne et de Fribourg. Ses recherches portent d’une part sur la littérature française du XIXe siècle, d’autre part sur l’esthétique du cinéma – et en particulier sur les liens entre le cinéma et les autres arts. Il a publié de nombreux articles sur Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Alphonse de Lamartine, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Eugène Fromentin, les frères Goncourt, Théophile Gautier, Gustave Moreau, Luchino Visconti, François Truffaut, Marguerite Duras, Roland Barthes, ainsi que sur les adaptations filmiques de Marcel Proust. Un livre en deux volumes issu de sa thèse de doctorat, intitulé Luchino Visconti et la peinture, va paraître cet automne aux éditions MétisPresses, à Genève. Il édite également cette année, toujours aux éditions MétisPresses et en collaboration avec Frédéric Elsig et Imola Kiss, les actes du colloque Les genres picturaux : genèses, métamorphoses, transpositions. Il travaille actuellement à un ouvrage sur les liens entre Chateaubriand et l’esthétique néoclassique.

Maria DiBattista is professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she is also the chair of the film studies committee. She has written numerous articles on modern literature and film. Among her books are First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction, Fast Talking Dames, and Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography. Her new book, Novel Characters, will be published this fall.

Vita Fortunati is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bologna. Her main areas of research are modernism, utopian literature, women’s studies and cultural memory. She has focused her research in utopian studies on utopia as a literary genre (La letteratura utopica inglese, Longo, 1979), on the re-writing of the myth of the Apocalypse, on utopia and women’s writing, and on the work of More, Hall, Paltock, Swift, Bentham, Morris, Forster, Orwell. She has wrote articles on the notion of “critical nostalgia” (“Memory, Desire and Utopia: a New Perspective on the Notion of Critical Utopia”, in Time Refigured. Myths, Foundation Texts and Imagined Communities, Eds Martin Procházka and Ond?ej Pilný, Prague, 2005).She is the Director of the Interdepartmental Centre for Utopian Studies of the University of Bologna, and of Forme dell’Utopia, a series of utopian primary texts and critical studies. She is the editor, together with Raymond Trousson, of the Dictionary of Literary Utopias (Champion, 2000). She has promoted a trans-cultural investigation of the relationships between utopia and national cultural identity (Utopianism / Literary Utopias and National Cultural Identities: a Comparative Perspective, P. Spinozzi ed., Bologna , Compositori, 2001). Dall’utopia all’utopismo. Percorsi tematici, a cura di Vita Fortunati, Raymond Trousson, Adriana Corrado, Napoli, cuen, 2003. Histoire transnationale de l’utopie littéraire et de l’utopisme , coordonnée par Vita Fortunati et Raymond Trousson, avec la collaboration de Paola Spinozzi , Honoré Champion, Paris , 2008. Since 2006 she is the Co-ordinator of ACUME2 - a European Thematic Network on”Interfacing Sciences, Literature and Humanities”. She has recently founded together with Elena Agazzi a series of books Interfacing Sciences, Literature and Humanities, V&R unipress Scientific Series, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht ,Gottingen. She has published on verbal and visual representations of the body (The Controversial Women’s Body. Images and Representations in Literature and Art, Bologna, 2003, with Annamaria Lamarra and Eleonora Federici); female aging between culture and medicine; memory from a female perspective (Studi di genere e memoria culturale, Women and Cultural Memory, eds Vita Fortunati, Gilberta Golinelli, Rita Monticelli, 2004); memory and trauma (The Impact of the First World War on Private Lives: A Comparison of European and American Writers: Ford, Hemingway, and Remarque, Ed. Joseph Wisenfarth, Amsterdam-New York, 2004.She has recently coedited with Elena Agazzi, Memoria e Saperi : Percorsi transdisciplinari , Roma , 2007 and with Maurizio Ascari and Daniela Fortezza, I Conflitti, Roma , 2008.

José M. González García has been Professor at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology and at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has also been Visiting Professor in European and Latin American Universities: Heidelberg, Konstanz, Humboldt and Free University of Berlin, Hamburg, UNAM, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Costa Rica, Nacional of Colombia and Antioquia (Medellin), Universidad de Santiago (Chile) among others. Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, since 2003. He is currently Research Professor at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research, where he was Director of the Institute of Philosophy between 1998 and 2006. Author of over 130 publications, his books include The Sociology of Knowledge, today (1979), The bureaucratic machine. Elective Affinities between Max Weber and Kafka (1989), Traces of Faust. Goethe's Legacy in the Sociology of Max Weber (1992), The Sociology of Knowledge and Science (with Emilio Lamo de Espinosa and Cristóbal Torres (1994), Metaphors of Power (1998) and The Goddess Fortuna. Metamorphosis of a Political Metaphor (2006). This latter book won the Spanish National Price for Non-fictional Literature (Premio Nacional de Ensayo) in 2007. Now he is writing a book on Walter Benjamin and his Angel of History.

Daniela Guardamagna is Professor of English Literature at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. Her main areas of research are Jacobean drama, contemporary drama (Beckett in particular), utopias and dystopias. She has translated for both cinema and theatre, and has adapted the BBC versions of Othello, Macbeth and The Tempest for Italian television (RAI). Her publications include: The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett, co-edited with Rossana Sebellin(Laterza-“Tor Vergata” University Press, 2009); Il teatro giacomiano e carolino (Carocci 2002), La narrativa di Aldous Huxley (Adriatica 1990), Analisi dell’incubo. L’utopia negativa da Swift alla fantascienza (Bulzoni 1980), and several essays published in Italy and abroad, on utopias, dystopias, Beckett, Shakespeare and Jacobean theatre.

Orsetta Innocenti (Università di Siena), (Italy, 1972), graduated in Teoria della Letteratura at the University of Pisa (1996); she is alumna of the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa), where she took her Diploma in 1997. In 2001 she defended her PhD Thesis in Letterature Comparate (Comparative Literature) at the University of Roma Tre, where she has had a two-years (2002-2004) Junior Research Fellowship. From 2004 to 2006 she held a two-years post-doctoral fellowship in Comparative Literature at the University of Bologna. She currently holds (since 2003/04) a temporary position as teacher of Italian Literature at the University of Siena (Facoltà di Lettere, sede di Arezzo) and since 2001 she also holds a permanent position as teacher of 'Materie Letterarie' at the "I.I.S. - Istituto di Istruzione Superiore Ferraris-Brunelleschi", of Empoli. Since 2002 she is part of Synapsis Committee.Her fields of research are the representation of Romance in contemporary European literature, the relationship between literature and history, the relationship between science and literature and the juvenile literature.

Neil ten Kortenaar is director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He teaches African, Caribbean, and South Asian literatures. His book Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (2004) is published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Among his articles in the last five years are: “Multiculturalism and Globalization.” The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature. Ed. Eva-Marie Kroller and Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 556-79. “Achebe’s Arrow of God and the Problem of Succession.” Forthcoming in Memories of Home: Generations and Genealogy in African Writing. Ed. Yianna Liotsos. Africa-World Press. “Achebe’s Arrow of God and the World on Paper.” Novel 42.3 (2009). “Things Fall Apart in History.” Interventions 11.2 (2009). “Fearful Symmetry: Salman Rushdie and Prophetic Newness.” Twentieth- Century Literature 54.3 (2008). “Œdipe et les fils des indépendances africaines.” Relations familiales dans les littératures française et francophone des XXe et XXIe siècles I: La figure du père. Ed. Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. “Fathers and Ancestors in Charles Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain.” Manning the Nation: Father Figures in Zimbabwean Literature and Society. Eds. K.Z. Muchemwa and Robert Muponde. Johannesburg: Jacana; Harare: Weaver Press, 2007. “Oedipus, Ogbanje, and the Sons of Independence.” Research in African Literatures 38.2 (2007). “Chinua Achebe and the Question of Modern African Tragedy.” Philosophia Africana 9.2 (2006). Rpt. in Things Fall Apart: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Criticism/Chinua Achebe. Ed. Francis Abiola Irele. New York: Norton, 2009. “Parents, Children, and Fools.” Scrutiny 2 11.1 (2006). “We Are Waiting for You Whites to Tell Us Your Stories.” Postcolonial Text [on-line] 2.3 (2006). “Becoming African and the Death of Ikemefuna.” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (2004). Rpt. in Modern Critical Interpretations: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Second edition. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2009.

Ariane Landuyt. Since 1980 Ariane Landuyt is full professor of Contemporary History at the University of Siena, where she is also directing the Centre of Excellence Jean Monnet “Centro interdipartimentale di ricerca sull’integrazione europea (CRIE)” and the Punto Europa/Europe Direct of the same University. Since 2000 she is Jean Monnet Chair in History of European Integration. In the field of European studies, since 1986 she is the Co-ordinator at the University of Siena of Erasmus/Socrates programs of Contemporary History/European Studies, that group together more than 20 Universities. She is one of the promoters, and member of the teaching board of the Ph.D. in “Storia e politica dell'Integrazione europea” which was established in 1988 by the Universities of Pavia in cooperation with the Universities of Genoa, Florence, Turin and Siena. Since 2000, she is also the director of the Master in European Studies “The process of building Europe” promoted by the University of Siena in cooperation with ten other Universities: Strasbourg, Panteion/Athens, Hannover, Salamanca, Coimbra/Azores, Jagiellonski/ Krakow, Montpellier I, Oradea, Maribor, Bologna(Forlì). Since 1999 she was nominated Academic Expert by the European Commission. In January 2008, on the invitation of the European Parliament’s President she joined the committee of academic experts who is the supervisor of the European Parliament Visiting Centre set up. She is co- editor of the collection “Fonti e studi sul federalismo e sull’integrazione europea” for the publishing house “Il Mulino” (Bologna) and she is editor of the collection “Europa, socialismo, democrazia” for the publishing house “Franco Angeli” (Milano). She is the President of the Scientific Committee of the review “Imago Europae” supported by the Europe Direct of Firenze and of Siena in collaboration with the CRIE of the University of Siena. She published several articles and books on European Integration History in Italian, French and English for Il Mulino (Bologna), Franco Angeli (Milano), Sedes (Paris), Quarteto (Coimbra), Editions Ouest (Nantes), Giunti (Firenze, Protagon (Siena). She is currently working on the development of the EEC/EU social policy (historical perspective) and on a collective project aiming to illustrate the EU 25 member States’ approach towards European Integration in History.

Anna Masecchia (Napoli, 07-12-1974), dottore di ricerca in “Comparatistica: letteratura, teatro, cinema”-XVII ciclo, è docente a contratto di “Storia del cinema italiano” presso la Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia di Arezzo – Università degli Studi di Siena (dal 2005/2006). Uno dei suoi campi di ricerca è il rapporto tra cinema e letteratura, con un'attenzione specifica per la relazione tra i due mezzi di espressione artistica e per la migrazione di temi e forme narrative dall'uno all'altro. In Al cinema con Proust (Marsilio, Venezia 2009), all’attenzione al lavoro di traduzione cinematografica effettuato da sceneggiatori e registi, soprattutto in rapporto alla difficile gestione del je della Recherche, si è associata l’analisi dell’innesto della concezione proustiana dell’arte sui processi creativi di registi come Raoul Ruiz, Chantal Akerman, Fabio Carpi. Si sta dedicando, negli ultimi anni, a due altre ricerche: l’uso cinematografico della fotografia come innesco del racconto e del rapporto tra spettatore e film che ne deriva (cfr. La materia dell’immaginazione: Agnès Varda tra fotografia e cinema, in «La Valle dell’Eden», anno X, n. 20-21, gennaio-dicembre 2008, pp. 229-240); la diva cinematografica in rapporto alle sue "antenate culturali" letterarie e teatrali (cfr.: Il corpo di Eva e la scrittura del film, in L. De Giusti (a cura di), Joseph Losey. Senza re, senza patria, Il Castoro, Milano 2010, pp. 58-73; Dietro il sipario: La Dame aux camélias di Alla Nazimova, in G. Carluccio-S. Alovisio (a cura di), Rodolfo Valentino. La seduzione del mito,Kaplan, Torino 2010).  In ultimo, una monografia su Vittorio De Sica attore è attualmente in revisione (L'Epos, Palermo; cfr. anche Vittorio De Sica e i Pane, amore e...: serialità d’attore e carattere nazionale, in «AAM-TAC», 4, 2007, pp. 91-100). Ha curato Metropolis. Quaderni di Synapsis IX (Le Monnier, Firenze 2010).

Barry McCrea is from Dublin, Ireland. He holds a B.A. in Spanish and French from Trinity College Dublin,and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. He is currently Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale University. He is the author of The First Verse, a novel. His next book, World of Strangers, forthcoming from Columbia University Press, has chapters on Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce and Proust, and examines how ideas of family inform narrative structure in the modernist novel. He is currently working on an essay on mid-20thC Irish (Gaelic) language poetry by non-native speakers."

Simona Micali (b. 1972) studied Humanities and Italian Studies at the University of Pisa and at the Scuola Normale Superiore; then took a PhD in Italian Literature at the University "Ca' Foscari" in Venice. From 2001 to 2004 she was Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bologna; in 2004-2005 she was Visiting Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University (USA). Presently she is Assistant Professor (Ricercatore) of Italian Literature at the University of Siena (Arezzo). From 1997 to 2004 she was Treasurer of the "Associazione per gli Studi di Teoria e Storia Comparata della Letteratura" (Italian branch of ICLA); since 2001 she ia a member of the Executive Committee of Synapsis. Since 2003 she is also on the Editorial Board of «Contemporanea. Rivista di studi sulla letteratura e sulla comunicazione». She has published three books ("L'innamoramento", Laterza 2001; "Miti e riti del moderno", Le Monnier 2002; "Ascesa e declino dell'Uomo di lusso. Il romanzo dell'intellettuale nella Nuova Italia e i suoi modelli europei", Le Monnier 2008) and several essays on modern and postmodern literature; she also edited the proceedings of Synapsis 2001 ("Cospirazioni, trame", Le Monnier 2003).

Florian Mussgnug (BA Oxon, MSt Oxon, Perf. Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa) is Lecturer in Italian Literature at University College London where he also convenes the MA in Comparative Literature. He is co-editor of Contemporanea: Rivista di Studi sulla letteratura e sulla comunicazione, a member of the editorial board of Italian Studies, of the executive committee of the British Comparative Literature Association, and of the Réseau Européen d'Etudes Littéraires Comparées. He writes regularly for L’Indice dei Libri and for the TLS. His publications include The Eloquence of Ghosts: Giorgio Manganelli and the Afterlife of the Avant-Garde (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010); Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture (ed. with P. Antonello, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009); Folly: Special Issue of Comparative Critical Studies (ed. with L. Boldrini, Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Lutero: Il padre della Riforma protestante (Firenze: Giunti, 2003), as well as articles on Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, Luciano Berio, Gruppo 63, avant-garde literature, philosophy and literature. His research interests include modernism and postmodernism, comparative literature, apocalypse fiction, philosophy of language and literary theory, avant-garde and experimental literature.

Negli anni Ottanta, Giuseppe Piccioni si è formato alla Scuola di Cinematografia della Gaumont, ispirata e diretta da Renzo Rossellini, e si è laureato in Sociologia. Il suo lavoro di regia si è rapidamente imposto all'attenzione di critica e pubblico, anche grazie ad uno stile molto personale evidente fin da Il Grande Blek (1987), lungometraggio d'esordio prodotto dalla casa di produzione "Vertigo", da lui fondata. Il film ha ottenuto numerosi premi, tra cui un Nastro d'Argento e Il Premio De Sica per il giovane cinema italiano. Il secondo lungometraggio, Chiedi la luna gli fa vincere il Grolla d'oro per la miglior regia. Margherita Buy, invece, riceve il Sacher d'oro per la migliore interpretazione femminile. Dopo altre esperienze di sceneggiatura e regia, è Fuori dal mondo (1998) a ricevere un importante successo di pubblico e molti premi prestigiosi: 5 David di Donatello – anche quello per il miglior film italiano dell'anno –, il Premio Flaiano per la regia, il Premio Amidei per la miglior sceneggiatura dell'anno e il Premio Casa Rossa per il miglior film indipendente italiano. Nel 2001 Luce dei miei occhi viene selezionato tra i film in concorso al festival di Venezia. Sandra Ceccarelli e Luigi Lo Cascio, protagonisti del film, ricevono entrambi la Coppa Volpi. La collaborazione con i due attori continua con La vita che vorrei (2004). Il film viene selezionato nella sezione "Panorama" del Festival di Berlino 2005 e in concorso al Festival di Mosca 2005 e al Festival di S. Francisco 2006. Nel 2009 ha girato Giulia non esce la sera, film che riprende molti temi da lui trattati in precedenza ma che sembra anche inaugurare una ulteriore fase di ricerca nel suo cinema. Tra gli altri lavori del regista vanno ricordati Le parole del cuore, interessante film di montaggio prodotto dalla RAI nell'ambito del Progetto "Alfabeto italiano" nel 1997, e i due ritratti d'attrice in forma di documentario Sandra, ritratto confidenziale (2002) e Margherita, ritratto confidenziale (2003). Tra i fondatori della Libreria del Cinema di Roma, nata nel 2005, Piccioni si dedica costantemente alla promozione della cultura cinematografica e viene invitato a tenere conferenze, sul suo lavoro e sul cinema in generale, in Italia e all'estero.

Julien Zanetta est doctorant au Centre Interfacultaire en Sciences Affectives (CISA) à Genève. Il est titulaire d’un Master en littérature française à l’Université de Johns Hopkins ainsi que d’un Master en littérature française et comparée à l’Université de Genève. Il poursuit une thèse sous la direction du Prof. Patrizia Lombardo. Ses recherches portent essentiellement sur Baudelaire, auquel il a consacré son mémoire (La mémoire et son double – Conceptions de la mémoire dans le Salon de 1846, le Salon de 1859 et Le peintre de la vie moderne) ainsi que sur les rapports entre littérature et peinture aux XIXe et XXe siècles.

Paolo Zanotti, born in 1971, currently lives in Bologna. He published two books on juvenile literature ("Il modo romanzesco", Laterza, and "Il giardino segreto e l'isola misteriosa", Le Monnier), a study on the cultural history of homosexuality ("Il gay", Fazi), and a novel ("Bambini bonsai", Ponte alle Grazie). He also edited an anthology of 19th-Century writings on homosexuality ("Classici dell'omosessualità", Rizzoli), translated R.L. Stevenson's "Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin" (Sellerio), and published several short stories in literary magazines ("Il Caffè illustrato", "Nuova prosa") and anthologies ("Best off 2005", minimum fax).