Liliana Ellena

Liliana Ellena undertook her postgraduate studies in London, where she completed her MA in Gender and Ethnic Studies at the University of Greenwich in 1997. She then received her PhD in Contemporary History at the University of Turin in 2001. Since 2002 she divides her work up into her work as a primary school teacher and her work as an independent historian and researcher. She has been involved in several international collaborative projects and European research networks. In 2002-2004 she was research fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen (Germany) and more recently she taught cultural history and women’s and gender history at the University of Turin.

Situated in the fields of postcolonial, gender and cultural studies, her early research has focused on interwar Italian cinema in order to study the ways in which issues of gender and race were crucial to the fascist project to modernize and re-build the Italians. Later on, her work expanded its focus to the memory of colonialism in postwar Italy, to the connection between decolonization, migration and postcolonial memory in European cinema and to transnational approaches to the history of women’s and feminist movements. In her current research, she draws on visual sources in order to map out the historical and cultural processes moulding the relationship between bodies, diasporic spaces and cultural borders in postcolonial Europe. She is particularly interested in the question how visual narratives and contemporary art rework the idea of “archive” and provide new insights into the performativity of memory.


She has edited the new Italian edition of Frantz Fanon I dannati della terra (2001) and with Alexander Geppert and Luisa Passerini is the editor of New Dangerous Liasons. Discourses on Europe and Love in the Last Century (2010). Her work has been published in several Italian and international journals and books.

Email: [email protected]

Working languages: Italian, English, French

Curriculum Vitae

List of Publications

List of Papers

Performing Post-colonial Memory: Visual Practices and the Archive

Presentations and Lectures

October 10, Bagnone, Italy