Dr. Giorgia Alù – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Giorgia Alù

The University of Sydney
Italian Studies

External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
November 2022 – February 2023

Last Update: 08.11.2024

Curriculum Vitae

Giorgia Alù is Associate Professor and Chair of Italian Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures, University of Sydney. She received her PhD from the University of Warwick in 2005. Before moving to Sydney in 2008 she taught at the University of Warwick and the University of Reading (UK). She has published extensively on travel writing, women’s writing and mobility, photography in Italian culture and on the text-image relationship. Her publications include the books Journeys Exposed: Women’s Writing, Photography and Mobility (London-New York, 2019); Enlightening Encounters: Photograph in Italian Literature (Toronto, 2015); and Beyond the Traveller’s Gaze: British Expatriate Ladies in Sicily (1848-1910) (Oxford-Bern, 2008). She has held fellowships at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is chief investigator in a large ARC-Australian Research Council project (2021-2024) on “Opening Australia’s Multilingual Archive”.

Selected Publications

Journeys Exposed: Women’s Writing, Photography and Mobility (New York and London: Routledge, 2019). Reprinted paperback, 2020.
Ed. with Sally Hill, ‘Travel Writing and the Visual’, co-edited special issue, Studies in Travel Writing, 22.1, 2018.
‘Order and otherness in a photographic shot: Italians abroad and the Great War’, Modern Italy. Vol. 22, no. 3, (2017), pp. 291-314.
Ed. with Nancy Pedri, Enlightening Encounters: Photography in Italian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2015).
Beyond the Traveller’s Gaze: British Expatriate Ladies in Sicily (1848-1910) (New York/Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008).

FRIAS Project

Narratives of labour: subjection, compassion and global interchanges in the history of sulphur mining in Sicily

This project explores how perceptions of human exploitation are suggested, maintained and mislaid through the interrelation of visual and written texts, and how these texts promote or work against a culture of compassion, solidarity and ethical awareness. By looking at the history of sulphur mining in Sicily (Italy), from the 1800s to the 1960s, from a global and comparative perspective, and by employing an interdisciplinary approach, this project aims: to show how experiences of dominion and hardship are appropriated and translated into a vocabulary and imagery that reveal a blind spot in the historical and economic inheritance of forms of subjection and slavery; to uncover how some of these narratives can, nevertheless, contribute to structure a more nuanced vision of the sulphur miners as actants in dynamic cultural, economic, political as well as environmental interactions across time and space.