Daphné Budasz is a historian, cultural mediator and antiracist activist. She holds a PhD in history from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. Her research interests include the history gender, sexuality, race, colonialism, (de)coloniality, East Africa, colonial memory and legacies in Europe. In her PhD thesis, entitled “Cross-cultural intimacy, Race and Migration in British East Africa, 1895-1920s”, she explored the ways in which racial, sexual and gender norms were conceived, interpreted, experienced and, most importantly, challenged in colonial context. She works as an independent researcher and consultant for cultural institutions and non-profit organisations.

Markus Wurzer is historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle an der Saale. He studied history and German language and literature at the Universities of Graz and Bologna. He was a research assistant and lecturer at the Department of History at the University in Graz as well as a university assistant at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at the University in Linz. His research has taken him to the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome, the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Harvard University in Cambridge/MA and the European Academy (EURAC) in Bolzano/Bozen. He is co-coordinator of www.postcolonialitaly.com and member of the Steering Committee of “Evidence and Imagination – Special Editions”. Wurzer has received numerous prizes for his work, including the 2016 award of the Dr. Alois Mock Europa-Stiftung for his MA thesis and the 2019 award of the Theodor Körner Fonds for his dissertation. In his PhD thesis he focused on Italy’s colonial enterprise against Ethiopia (1935-1941) in visual culture and family memories. Drawing on the photographs of Italy’s German-speaking soldiers from the province of Bolzano/Bozen as a case study, the thesis explored private photographic practices, the construction and diffusion of colonial (and fascist) visual culture, and followed its persisting traces in family memory until the present day.

Serena Alessi works at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, where she is Cultural Promotion Officer. She received her PhD in Italian Studies in 2015 from Royal Holloway University of London, where she also taught Italian language and culture. She subsequently held postdoctoral fellowships at The British School at Rome, at the Fondazione Cini in Venice, and at the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York. Among other research themes, she investigated the representation of the city of Rome in Italian postcolonial women writers. 

Sofia Bacchini is a PhD candidate at the department of Human and Social Sciences at University “L’Orientale” of Napoli and a researcher at the Centro Studi per la Stagione dei Movimenti of Parma. Her research interests focus on contemporary and social history of the Arab world, history of colonialism and decolonial processes in the Mediterranean space. She was co-curator of the national conference “Ti porterò dell’Africa un bel fior” (2020) on Italian colonialism and its legacies in the present, and she’s a contributor of the publication “L’esploratore perso nell’oblio. Vittorio Bottego tra mito, storia e rimosso coloniale” (PiGreco 2022). She’s one of the founders of the “Musei Urbani” project (2020) and responsible for historical research.

Carmen Belmonte is a researcher at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut. Her research focuses on the visual culture and material legacy of Italian colonialism and Fascism. She has published several contributions on colonial visual and material culture in nineteenth-century Italy. She is currently working on a book project centered on the role of the arts in Italian colonialism and she is editing a multi-authored volume that explores the afterlife of Fascist-era architecture, monuments and works of art, questioning the concept of difficult heritage in relation to the Italian nation. Carmen obtained a PhD in Art History from the University of Udine in 2017. Her postdoctoral research has been funded by the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute, the American Academy in Rome, the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, New York.

Devorah Block is an independent consultant on education and strategy in the cultural sector. She has worked with collections as diverse as the Museum of Modern Art, the Pinacoteca di Brera and the Historical Archives of the European Union and with everyone from families to graduate students. She launched the non-profit project The Book Initiative in 2021. Her degrees are in Art History (BA, University of Sydney; MA, Syracuse University) and Studies in Visual Representation (PhD, Scuola Normale Superiore). She has dual USA-NZ citizenship and has been in Italy since 2003, where she lives with her husband and their two children. She contributes to Post Colonial Italy with proofreading English entries to the site and virtual tours, and any other way she can!

Elena Cadamuro is a PhD candidate at the department of Antiquity, Philosophy and History at University of Genoa. Her PhD research revolves around the images of the African continent and its national communities in the Italian mass culture between 1948 and 1994; through the analysis of these representations on newspapers, magazines and television, the aim is to underline how racist stereotypes continued to be transmitted and spread after the formal loss of all the colonial possessions (1947), and to study how the memory of the Italian colonialism was formed from a visual perspective. Her research interests include museum studies, photography and the fields of the nation and state building. As co-curator, she also contributed to develop the exhibition on Italian colonialism Ascari e Schiavoni. Il razzismo coloniale e Venezia (2017), main source for the Venezia Imperiale map.

Valeria Deplano is a lecturer in history at the University of Cagliari. Her research interests focus on the history of Italian colonialism, its cultural impact on Italian society, its link with the nation-building process, and its legacies in Republican Italy, with an emphasis on racism. Among her publications: “Per una nazione colonial” (Morlacchi 2018); “La Madrepatria è una terra straniera. Libici, eritrei e somali nell’Italia del dopoguerra” (Le Monnier 2017), “L’Africa in casa. La propaganda coloniale durante il fascismo” (Le Monnier, 2015); “Quel che resta dell’impero. La cultura coloniale degli italiani” (ed. with A. Pes, Mimesis 2014); Between 2013 and 2016 she carried out a research project on the public memory of colonialism in Sardinia (“Sardegna d’oltremare”), connected with the national project “Returning and sharing memories”(University of Modena and Reggio Emilia).

Marco Donadon is PhD student in Historical, Geographical, Anthropological Studies at University of Padua, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and University of Verona. His project of research intends to shape the biography of Alberto Pariani (Italian General Army) starting from the analysis of his diaries written during his stay in the prison of Procida (1944-1947), where other relevant figures of fascist regime and Italian Army were incarcerated after the fallen of the fascism and the armistice of Cassibile.
Previously he obtained an MA at Ca’ Foscari with a thesis regarding the role of Venice and its university (Ca’ Foscari) during the Italian colonialism (1868-1943), a research inspired by his experience as co-curator of the exhibition on Italian colonialism Ascari e Schiavoni. Il razzismo coloniale e Venezia (2017), main source for the Venezia Imperiale map.

Born in Venice, Elisabetta Pauletti graduated in Classics in Rome, where she then spent much of her professional life, delving into the worlds of television, publishing, research, press, PR and TLC. She then concentrated on family, spending time in Rome, Sardinia, and England.
Renewed interest in publishing once she moved to Turin in 2016, (translating from English and creating websites) pushed her back into the game with focus on tourism. Her 2018 book Torino insolita e curiosa (‘Unusual and Curious Turin’) presents 40 little-known stories from the city’s history. In 2020, she published La Seconda Guerra Mondiale, an easy digest of World War 2 history. Both books come through Edizioni del Capricorno, Turin-based publishers.

Alessandro Pes is lecturer in contemporary history at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Cagliari. He deals with the history of colonialism and decolonization and the history of fascism in Italy. He is particularly involved in the historical reconstruction and analysis of the colonial inheritance in contemporary Italy. On these issues he has published, among others, “La costruzione dell’impero fascista” (Aracne 2010) and “Bonificare gli italiani” (AM&D 2013). He is the editor (with Valeria Deplano and Giuliana Laschi) of “Europe Between Migrations, Decolonization and Integration, 1945-1992” (Routledge 2020) and “Europa in Movimento” (Mulino 2017). Together with Valeria Deplano, he has edited “Quel che resta dell’impero” (Mimesis 2014).

Iris Pupella-Noguès is currently a PhD Candidate in contemporary history at the University of Paris-Est and University of Trieste. She works on the everyday political life of public spaces in the city of Trieste during the fascist period (1920-1943). She holds MAs in History (2016) and in Public History (2017) from University of Paris-Est and took her bachelor degree from University of Toulouse and University of Rome III. She worked for documentary production company O2B Films, for the French TV channel TF1 and, in 2017, she co-founded La Boîte à Histoire, a public history association based in Paris.

Eleonora Sartoni is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Italian at the Pennsylvania State University. She received her PhD in Italian Studies in January 2020 from Rutgers University. In her book manuscript, titled A Capital on Paper: Rome’s Monuments and Public Space in Cultural Representations of the Nation (1870–1895), she investigates the symbiotic relationship between monuments, architecture, urban plans, and popular media in the creation of Rome’s national identity. By engaging with the different narrative strategies used in the popular culture of the period to cast the idea of a modernized capital while renovations were still incomplete, A Capital on Paper unveils the fragility of national identity and the global capitalist model adopted for the transformation of Rome and offers narrations of resistance to homogenizing political and economic forces. Her research interests focus on urban studies, biopolitics, ecocriticism, cinema and literature exploring the relationship between body, society, and space.

Victoria Witkowski is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the British School at Rome (BSR), after having defended her PhD at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. Her thesis analysed the public life and collective remembrance of Rodolfo Graziani, and her current research focus is centred upon on twentieth century conceptions of fascist and colonial heroism. Her transnational research has taken her to archives, conferences and fellowships across Italy, the U.S. and the U.K.