Two scholarly (and eerie) talks organised by the University of Malta’s Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies
The Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies is proud to announce two public talks which will be delivered by Prof. Fabio Camilletti (University of Warwick).
The first talk, entitled ‘Vampires over Milan: from John Polidori to Emilio De Rossignoli’, will be offered in collaboration with the Faculty of Arts, within the newly-established interdepartmental ‘Literature Research Seminar’ Series.
This inaugural talk of the ‘Literature Research Seminar’ Series will be held in the Faculty of Arts Library (Old Humanities Building, 2nd floor, Msida Campus) on Friday 14 September at 18:00.
Milan holds a special, albeit relatively unknown, place in vampire history: there travels John Polidori, the author of the first modern vampire story, in 1816, and there – 150 years later – Istrian journalist Emilio De Rossignoli publishes ‘Io credo nei vampiri’, the first modern Italian treatise on vampires. Through a psycho-geographical tour of Milan, and particularly of the Porta Orientale area, Prof. Camilletti will explore the connections between vampirism, the plague, and Romanticism at the dawn of Italian modernity.
The second talk, entitled ‘Philology of Ghost Stories: Dickens, Lord Halifax, and a Haunted House in Lille’, will be held on Saturday 15 September, 18:30, at the Storm Petrel Foundation (79 Triq San Anton, Attard), in connection with the exhibition ‘The Other Side: Horror – Gothic – Science Fiction’, hosted by the foundation itself, and curated by Prof. Saviour Catania, Dr Fabrizio Foni (both lecturers of the University of Malta), and Ray Vassallo (a student of the M.A. in Film Studies, as well as an expert on SF).
The audience attending this talk will be given the opportunity to visit the exhibition, featuring precious and rare books, magazines, pressbooks, comic books, graphic novels, original comic-book art, movie posters and much more.
The audience attending this talk will be given the opportunity to visit the exhibition, featuring precious and rare books, magazines, pressbooks, comic books, graphic novels, original comic-book art, movie posters and much more.
Prof Camilletti’s second talk starts from a deceptively simple question: 'How do ghost stories travel?'. From a supernatural tale related by Dickens in one of his Christmas pieces to Lord Halifax’s ‘Ghost Book’, one of the most influential collections of ghost stories, the talk will reconstruct the origins and metamorphoses of a haunting taking place in Lille, just before the French Revolution. By bridging literature, urban folklore, and ‘real supernatural’ cases, Prof. Camilletti will not only trace the fascinating story of a British family haunted by the ghost of a French boy, but will have the opportunity to reflect on the way ghost stories puzzle our understanding of texts and their circulation.
Fabio Camilletti is Reader within the School of Modern Languages and Culture at the University of Warwick. He extensively published on Italian Romanticism, British Pre-Raphaelitism, and the European Gothic. Among his latest publications, the edition of the French-German collection of ghost stories ‘Fantasmagoriana’ (Nova Delphi, 2015), ‘Guida alla letteratura gotica’ (Odoya, 2018) and ‘Italia Lunare’ (P.I.E. – Peter Lang, 2018), as well as a new Italian translation of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ (forthcoming 2018) and ‘The Portrait of Beatrice: Dante, D.G. Rossetti, and the Imaginary Lady’ (forthcoming 2019).
The general public is cordially invited to both events.
