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Department of Italian

Cecilia BrioniVisiting Researcher

Contact: brionic@tcd.ie


Cecilia holds a BA in Modern History (Università di Bologna, 2008), a Master's Degree in Modern History and Society (Università di Pisa, 2011), and a PhD in Italian (University of Hull, 2017). She previously was a Teaching Fellow in Italian at the University of Hull (2018-2019), a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Bristol (2019-2020) and an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin (2020-2022).

Research

Cecilia's research interests focus on representations of age and aging in 20th- and 21st-century Italian popular culture, with a particular attention to the social construction of youth in a variety of cultural artifacts, including film, television, magazines, novels, and social media content. Her monograph Fashioning Italian Youth: Young People's Identity and Style in Italian Popular Media, 1958-1975 (Manchester University Press, publication date: December 2022) examines discourses around Italian young people's style and the body in youth-oriented popular culture from 1958 to 1975. Her publications have examined the emergence of youth stardom in 1960s Italian television, representations of young masculinities and the trend of long hair in 1960s film and print media, Blackness and stardom in Italian culture from the 1960s to the present day, the Musicarello (an Italian musical, youth-oriented film genre), and the relationship between subcultural youth and urban spaces in 1990s novels set in Bologna.

Her current research investigates whether social media allow for a diversification of representations of youth in the Italian context. Her most recent research project, funded by an IRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, has focused on (self-)representations of Italian YouTubers, young video creators who produce original video material and upload it on YouTube. Italian YouTubers often belong to of marginalized groups like Second Generations and members of the LGBTQ+ community who, in the last ten years, have become increasingly visible in Italian society. The research addresses two main themes: the celebrity status and self-representation strategies of Italian YouTube content creators, and the intersections of age, ethnicity, sexuality and gender in discourses around these content creators’ national identity, employing a combination of methodologies, such as interviews and critical discourse analysis of audio-visual texts.

Publications

Monographs

  • Fashioning Italian Youth: Young People’s Identity and Style in Italian Popular Media, 1958-1975 (2022). Manchester: Manchester University Press, ‘Studies in Popular Culture’ series.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

  • ‘Leaving the Group: Bologna as an Urban Mythscape for 1990s Italian Youth’. Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Special Issue 'City and Nation in Cultural Perspective' (September 2021), pp. 207–226.
  • ‘Shorn Capelloni: hair and young masculinities in the Italian media, 1965-1967’. Modern Italy, 25.1 (February 2020), pp. 3-16.
  • ‘Rita e «La Zanzara»: la costruzione dell’identità giovanile italiana nei film Musicarelli (1958-1968)’ in Parigi, S., Uva, C. and Zagarrio, V. (eds.) (2019), Cinema e identità italiana: cultura visuale e immaginario nazionale fra tradizione e modernità. Rome: Roma TrE-Press, pp. 711-720.
  • Co-authored. ‘Transnational “Italian” Stardom: Lara Saint Paul and the Performance of Race’. Italian Studies, 73.4 (Autumn 2018), pp. 351-364.
  • ‘Between Two Stages: Rita Pavone and i giovani on Studio Uno, 1961-1966’. Italian Studies, 72.4 (Autumn 2017), pp. 414-427.
  • ‘Poveri ma Belli’ in G. Solomons (ed.) (2014) World Film Locations: Rome. Bristol: Intellect Books, pp. 36-37.
  • ‘Gidget Goes to Rome’ in G. Solomons (ed.) (2014) World Film Locations: Rome. Bristol: Intellect Books, pp. 66-67.

Others

  • Researching Italian Youth across Time: an Interdisciplinary Approach. Interdisciplinary Italy website, 05/02/2021. Available online at: <http://www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org> [Accessed 05/02/2021].
  • Co-authored. Il Divario Nord-Sud. Teaching and learning materials for A Level Italian. The Italian Teaching Resources Website, 01/04/2020. Available online at: <https://www.teachitalian.co.uk/divario-nord-sud-project.html> [Accessed 03/02/2021].
  • Co-authored. Interdisciplinarity and Collaborative Writing in the Humanities: Lara Saint Paul and the Performativity of Race. Interdisciplinary Italy website, 22/05/2018. Available online at: <http://www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org/> [Accessed 10/11/2018].

Future Publications

  • ‘“Vedo che siamo moderni, eh?” Representations of Social Media Use in SKAM Italia’ in Barra, L., Hipkins, D., O’ Rawe, C. and Renga, D., Italian Contemporary Youth Television. In preparation (expected submission: November 2022).
  • ‘Margherita Buy’s 60th Birthday: Online Accounts of an Ageing (Anti-)Diva’s Career’ in Formenti, C., Barra, L., Pitassio, F. and Pierini, M., Italian Contemporary Screen Performers. Training, Production, Prestige (2000-2020). Target Publisher: Palgrave, Screen Industries and Performers Series. In preparation (expected submission: December 2022).