Biography
Elena Bellina joins the Eastman School of Music from New York University, where she is completing a Ph.D. dissertation on autobiographical writing in confinement, focusing on unpublished diaries and memoirs written by Italian prisoners of war in British military camps in Africa during WWII.
Her areas of expertise include autobiographical writing, modern and contemporary Italian literature, poetry, literary theory and criticism, and gender studies. She owns an MA in English from Youngstown State University and a laurea in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Bergamo (Italy). She has always been passionate about music, and earned degrees from the Conservatory of Music of Verona (Italy). During her years at the University of Bergamo, she developed an interdisciplinary approach to literature, musical semiotics and self-construction. She has continued to explore the relationships between Renaissance and Baroque music, literature, and cinema over the years. She also works on issues related to the representation of violence, war literature and documentary films.
She is strongly committed to teaching and has developed consistent experience, underscored by a solid pedagogical background in second-language acquisition in Italy and in the US. Her interdisciplinary background and training in literature and music, combined with her dynamic approach and scholarship, has led her to develop language courses based on Italian music and culture.
She has always been interested in investigating the way people recount their lives and the epistemic problems that life telling involves. This interest took her to South America in 2004 to shoot a documentary film on the lives of three Italian men who have played a central role in the socio-political development of Bolivia in the last fifty years.
In 2009-2010, as a fellow at the Humanities Initiative at NYU she organized Thinking Through Violence: An Interdisciplinary Conversation, a roundtable with some of the major experts in the field of the theory of violence followed by Poetry, Violence, and War: An Interdisciplinary Discussion on poetry and war in different cultures. She also organized a two-day conference on Ambience in the Humanities: Translating New Surroundings into New Poetics devoted to the analysis of how the materials that create particular ambiences do not merely inform the artistic creative process but literally form it, with scholars in literature, music, poets and visual artists.
Her publications include About Face: Depicting the Self in the Written and Visual Arts (with L. Eufusia and P. Ugolini, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009); State of Exception: Cultural Responses to the Rhetoric of Fear (with P. Bonifazio, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006); an essay on Iraqi-American poet Sinan Antoon and the translation in Italian of his provocative collection The Baghdad Blues (forthcoming in October 2011 with Poesia); Thinking Through Violence, a dossier on the online edition of Social Text (May 2011), co-edited with J. Martin Daughtry, Crystal Parikh, and Arvind Rajagopal, and essays on Thea Musgrave, Angela Carter and Elena Ferrante.
