Ben Lawton, associate professor of Italian and film/video studies at Purdue University, teaches and writes about cultural construction in cinema. Translator of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Heretical Empiricism (Indiana University Press, 1988; New Academia Publishing, 2005), Lawton has edited over fifteen volumes on film studies, cultural studies, and Romance languages and literatures.
Elena Coda, associate professor of Italian at Purdue University, teaches Italian and comparative literature. She focuses on the intersection of cultural, ethnic, and national identities in pre-WWI Trieste when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The author of Scipio Slataper (Palumbo, 2007), a key irredentist figure at the eve of the Great War, and of many articles on Triestine literature, focusing on writers such as Italo Svevo, Scipio Slataper, and Umberto Saba, she coedited the bilingual anthology The Promised Land: Italian Poetry After 1975 (Sun and Moon Press, 1997) and the collection of essays Balleriniana (Montanari, 2010).