Dr Erica Bellia

Erica Bellia is a Gulbenkian Early-Career Research Fellow in the Arts and Humanities (Italian Studies) at Churchill College, Cambridge. She is currently working on a comparative research project entitled Anthologising Blackness in Post-Fascist Italy and looking at anthologies of Black Literature translated and/or published in Italy from 1945 to the present. This project aims to use the anthology format as a lens to consider the importance of Black Literature in 20th- and 21st-century Italy. 

After a BA in Modern Literature from University of Catania and an MA in Italian Philology and Literature from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in 2021 Erica obtained a PhD in Italian from Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, with a thesis on industrial writing and anticolonial discourse in Italy, 1955-1965. Thanks to an MHRA scholarship, she has been reworking her thesis to publish it as a monograph (expected submission January 2024, Legenda). 

Erica’s research focus is on 20th- and 21st-century Italian culture. Her work so far has positioned itself at the intersection of two fields of inquiry: the study of labour narratives, from a productive and reproductive angle, and the investigation of Italian colonial, anticolonial and postcolonial experiences from a transnational perspective. Her projects aim to bridge these two areas and contribute to both. 

Erica is an active member of the ObERT committee (Observatoire Européen des Récits du Travail), which organises and co-ordinates research events and initiatives relating to labour narratives. In this role, in 2022, she co-run a series of online roundtables on Migration and Labour and in 2022-2023 she co-organised with Anna Ceschi (Polis) Being(s) in Labour: A Series of Film Screenings on Productive and Reproductive Labour at Cambridge. In June 2023, she was among the organisers of the first OBERT conference on Narrating Labour: Posture and Positionality (Aix-Marseille Université, 28–30 June 2023).

Academia page: https://cambridge.academia.edu/EricaBellia; Faculty page: https://www.mmll.cam.ac.uk/eb692