Thursday 23 March, 7pm
Pinocchio, Alice and Other Humanoids
A round table with Professor Laura Tosi (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice), talking about Alice and Pinocchio: National Icons and Vulnerable Children’s Bodies, Dr Georgia Panteli (University of Vienna and UCL), talking about Pinocchio and his many lives and ICI London’s Director Dr Katia Pizzi, author and editor of Pinocchio, puppets and modernity: the mechanical body.
Laura Tosi is a Full Professor of English Literature at the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia where she is deputy director of the Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati and supervisor of two Horizon Marie Curie Fellowships. Her research work focuses on the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline theatre, as well as English children’s literature. Among her publications Comunicazione e aggressione (Milano 1998), La memoria del testo (Pisa, 2001), Guida a Macbeth (2021), La fiaba letteraria inglese (2007), Raccontare Shakespeare ai bambini, in 2014 and most recently The Fabulous Journeys of Alice and Pinocchio: Exploring Their Parallel Worlds (McFarland, USA, 2018), winner of the l’AIA Book Prize 2020 and of the International Prize “Elisa Frauenfelder”.
Dr Georgia Panteli is Lecturer at the University of Vienna and at the UCL International Summer School for Undergraduates and a visiting Research Fellow at the University of Graz. Her monograph ‘From Puppet to Cyborg: Pinocchio’s posthuman journey’ was published last year by LEGENDA. She has talked about her research on Austrian national radio (ORF Radiokolleg) and on The Forum, BBC World Service (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct1rmn?fbclid=IwAR3KTYlHMyS-h2JvG6L1tJCIENJezkEZb-azBdliHu9FjRk3BkBgwqccOuw).
Her research and teaching include fairy tales, posthumanism, speculative fiction, film studies and feminism.
Katia Pizzi is the Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London and a Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her most recent publications are Trieste. Una frontiera letteraria (Trieste: Vita Activa, 2019), and Italian Futurism and the Machine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). She has also edited the volume Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity. The Mechanical Body (New York and London: Routledge, 2012).