I am deeply honoured to have been invited to speak at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in April of this year. My guest lecture to the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, entitled “Go West, Comrade! Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western”, will take place on Monday 16th April. The …

I’ll be addressing the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) annual conference in Boston, Massachusetts, which runs from March 21st-25th at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel and Towers. My paper is entitled “Italian Americanisms: Popular Italian Cinema in the Light of the Transnational”, and the abstract is as follows:
Defining …

I’ll be presenting a paper to the annual conference of the UK’s Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) at the University of Bedfordshire in January. My paper is entitled ‘La cinema all’americana? Defining the Transnational “Popular”‘. It seeks to recalibrate the discourse surrounding popular Italian cinema by suggesting that, …

I have written a short taster article for my forthcoming book, Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema. The article addresses the confused political agenda at the heart of Sergio Sollima’s Faccia a faccia (1967), and is up on the IB Tauris website, should you be interested.
Read …

I shall be giving a talk examining Giulio Petroni’s Tepepa (1969) as a site of contested cultural memory to the 2011 Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference, at the University of St. Andrews (6-9 July). The abstract is below.

La resistenza popolare: Transcultural Memory in Giulio Petroni’s Tepepa
That memories of the partisan …

I shall be giving a talk on the cult cachet of Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) to the fifth annual “Cine Excess” conference in May 2011, and Django himself will be in attendance! Guests of honour and veritable giants of cult Italian cinema Franco Nero and Ruggero Deodato will be the …

My latest article, ‘Go West, Comrade: Unearthing Politics in the Spaghetti Western’, has been published on the world’s foremost Euro Western fan site: the Spaghetti Western Database. I suggest therein that the political significance of the leftist Spaghettis that emerged in and around the era of protest (1966-1970) lies in their …

When Jean Baudrillard visited the USA, he wrote: ‘I was here in my imagination long before I actually came here’ (1988: 72). His words evoke an uncanny rendering of the culturally familiar, through the eyes of a European who has walked onto the world’s biggest movie set. Such a secondary experience of America was …

Though I had rather forgotten the fact, my Masters dissertation – “Sergio Leone and the Western Myth: Reading the Ritual” – is online for all to peruse. I wrote it almost ten years ago and much of it makes me cringe these days (I very much hope that my writing …

Intellect Books’ Directory of World Cinema: Italy, edited by Louis Bayman, is now available for pre-order. This exciting new volume is a scholarly yet accessible collection of writing from some of the world’s leading experts in Italian cinema. I was honoured to be asked to compile the book’s Spaghetti Westerns …

My article, “Out West, Down South: Gazing at America in Reverse Shot through Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe?” (The Italianist, (30:2) 2010) is now available for all to read and download free of charge, should you so wish. You can download the article in pdf format here, or just read it here: