Dr Emiliano Perra 

Lecturer in Modern European History 

Humanities and Social Sciences 

Email:

Emiliano.Perra@winchester.ac.uk 

Phone:

01962 827186 

Address:

Biography

I completed my first degree in Contemporary History at the University of Bologna and received my MA in Contemporary History from the University of Bristol, where I also completed my PhD in History in 2007. In 2008-09 I was appointed Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome. Before joining the University of Winchester, where I teach modules on the Third Reich and the Holocaust as well as on 20th-century European history, I worked as a part-time tutor at the University of Bristol and at Cardiff University.

Expertise

Holocaust Studies; Memory Studies

Publications

In preparation

‘After Holocaust: The Shoah in televised fictions in Italy and France: a compared reading of public memory and representation, 1979-2011’ La revue d’histoire de la Shoah 196 (2013)

‘Between National and Cosmopolitan: 21st-Century Holocaust Television in Britain, France and Italy’. In: A. Bangert, R. Gordon, and L. Saxton (eds), Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium (London: Legenda, 2012).

‘The First Lebanon War (1982) and the Construction of Jews as “Others” in Italian Public Debates’. In: D. Forgacs (ed.), Language, Space and Otherness in Italy since Unification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

‘I consumi culturali dal dopoguerra a oggi’. InL: S. Luzzatto, G. Pedullà and D. Scarpa (eds), Atlante della letteratura italiana. III: Dal Risorgimento a oggi (Turin: Einaudi, 2012).

‘Don’t look back in anger. The Holocaust as a European memory and Italian television in the 1960s’. In: R. Cowgill, T. Phillips, C. Scheer and G. Tourlamain (eds), Cultures of Memory in a Century of Conflict: European Responses to War Since 1914

‘Review of: S. Radstone and B. Schwarz (eds) (2010) Memory: History, Theories, Debates. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, pb, 500 pages, darkmatter Journal: In the Ruins of Imperial Culture (2011)

‘Intervista su Conflicts of Memory’, Incontri: Rivista Europea di Studi Italiani (2011)

Monographs

Conflicts of Memory: The Reception of Holocaust Films and TV Programmes in Italy: 1945 to the Present (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010)

Book chapters

‘La rappresentazione della Shoah in televisione’. In: M. Cattaruzza, M. Flores, S. Levis Sullam and E.Traverso (eds.), Storia della Shoah in Italia: Vicende, memorie, rappresentazioni, vol. ii (Turin: UTET, 2010): 434-45

‘Il dibattito pubblico sul comportamento del Vaticano durante la Shoah: la ricezione presso la stampa de Il Vicario, Rappresaglia e Amen’. In: S. Lucamante, M. Jansen, R. Speelman and S. Gaiga (eds), Memoria collettiva e memoria privata: il ricordo della Shoah come politica sociale (Utrecht: Igitur, 2008): 165-80
www.italianisticaultraiectina.org/publish/articles/000096/english.html

Journal articles

‘Legitimizing Fascism through the Holocaust? The Reception of the Miniseries Perlasca: un eroe italiano in Italy’, Memory Studies, 3/2 (2010): 95-109

‘Narratives of Innocence and Victimhood: The Reception of the Miniseries Holocaust in Italy’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 22/3 (2008): 411-40

‘Narrazioni di un trauma: l’Olocausto dalla storiografia al cinema’, Discipline Filosofiche, 16/1 (2006): 37-54

Formidabili quei traumi. Tempo storico, elaborazione e feticismo narrativo in The Dreamers, La meglio gioventù e Buongiorno, notte’, Zapruder, 1/3 (2004): 125-9

Reviews

Review of: Yosefa Loshitzky (2010) Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pb, x+215 pages, darkmatter Journal: In the Ruins of Imperial Culture, 7 (2011)

Review of Piera Sonnino, This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), H-Italy (H-Net Reviews) (2007)

Conferences and Seminars

2012:  23-25 February, ‘The Holocaust on British Television, 1973-2005’, The Gazing Society: Approaches to the History of Vision in the Modern Period (University of Padua, Italy).

2011: 6-9 July, ‘The ‘Telenovelisation’ of World War II and the Holocaust in Twenty-first Century Television’, Media History and Cultural Memory: XXIV International Conference on History and Media (University of Copenhagen, Denmark).

2011: 15-17 June, ‘Italian debates on the “Americanization of the Holocaust”’, American responses to the Holocaust: Transatlantic Perspectives (Roosevelt Study Center and Institute for Jewish Studies, Middelburg, The Netherlands and Antwerp, Belgium).

2011: 12 May, Identità ebraica e identità italiana (Salone Internazionale del Libro, Turin, Italy).

2011: 28-29 January, Presentazione libro “Conflicts of Memory”, Il giallo e il nero: riflessi dell’antisemitismo nella letteratura ebraica moderna (Istituto Culturale Ebraico del Trentino ICET “Zygmunt Bauman”, Trento, Italy).

2010: 8-10 November, ‘La Shoah nella miniserie TV’, Il ruolo della televisione nella costruzione dell’identità nazionale (Villa comunale, Frosinone, Italy).

2010: 17-19 July, ‘The Holocaust as a European Memory in Italian Television from the 1960s to the Present’, Interdisciplinary Colloquium: Conflict, Memory and Memorialisation: War and European Culture in the Twentieth Century (Archbishop Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies, Liverpool Hope University).

2010: 24-25 June, ‘The First Lebanon War (1982) and the Construction of Jews as “Other” in Italian Public Debates’, Language, space and otherness in Italy since 1861 (British School at Rome, Rome, Italy).

2009: 27 May, ‘The Banality of Goodness: The Reinvention of the “Rescuer” in RAI programmes on the Holocaust’ (British School at Rome, Rome, Italy).

2007: 10-12 September, ‘Legitimising Fascism through the Holocaust. The Reception of the Miniseries “Giorgio Perlasca” in Italy’, MEICAM, the Modern European Ideologies, Conflict and Memory Research Group (Swansea University).

2007: 6-7 June, ‘Italian Postwar Debates on the Vatican during the Holocaust: The Press Reception of “The Deputy”, “Massacre in Rome”, and “Amen.”’, Memoria collettiva: il ricordo della Shoah come politica sociale (Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut, Rome, Italy).

2005: 25 January, ‘The Reception of Holocaust Films in Italy’, work-in-progress seminar (Faculty of Arts, University of Bristol).

Research Interests

My primary research interest is in the field of Holocaust Studies. My doctoral research reconstructed the often conflicting memories of the Holocaust in Italy through analysis of the reception of films and television miniseries. This theme was developed during my 2008-9 Rome Fellowship at the British School at Rome. The research focussed on the representation of the Holocaust in Italian State television RAI from the 1950s to the present, thus examining the role played by this hugely influential but still relatively understudied medium in shaping Italy’s Holocaust memory. The continuities and ruptures in the country’s coming to terms with this part of its recent past are discussed in my book Conflicts of Memory (Peter Lang, 2010), and in a series of articles.

The interest in television’s role as an agent of memory in modern Europe also informs my current research projects.

I am also interested more generally in 20th-century Italian and European history, and in particular in the relationship between history, representation and public memory. 

Funding Awards and Professional Membership

Funding

2002-2006 AHRC Doctoral Scheme

2008-2009 Rome Fellowship at the British School at Rome (sponsored by the British Academy)

Membership

IAMHIST (International Association for Media and History)

SISSCO (Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea)