Professor Gene Brucker
Shepard Professor of History, Emeritus. University of California, Berkeley

Gene Brucker taught history at Berkeley from 1954 until his retirement in 1991. He was named Shepard Professor of History in 1980. He was elected "Socio Straniero" of the Deputazione di Storia Patria per la Toscana in 1976, and in 1980 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was chosen a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (1978) and was elected president of the Renaissance Society of America (1990-91). He was the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship (1948-1950), a Fullbright Scholarship (1952-54), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1960-61), an ACLS Fellowship (1964-65) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1979-80). He spent one year as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1968-69) and in 1983 he was Acting Director of the Harvard Centre for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Florence. He was chair of the Berkeley History Department (1969-72) during the University's ‘time of troubles’. He served on several Academic Senate committees, including the Budget Committee (1974-78) and the Committee on Senate Policy (1978-79, 1980-82). He was chair of the Academic Senate from 1984 to 1986. He was awarded the Berkeley Citation in 1991, on the occasion of his retirement from the University.

While in military service in southern France during World War II, Brucker became attracted to the Mediterranean world: its terrain, its people, its cuisine and its culture. While a student at Oxford he began a life long involvement with the history of Renaissance Florence. He first visited that city in the spring of 1949, while it was still recovering from the ravages of war. On returning there as a Fullbright student in 1952, he began to explore the vast resources of Florence's archives housed in the Uffizi Palace. That historical laboratory became his home away from home for the next four decades. Its resources provided material for a comprehensive analysis of the city's politics, its economic and social structures, its religious institutions and its culture. The tangible results of this archival immersion are: two large, heavily footnoted scholarly tomes, two ouvrages de vulgarisation, a microhistory, a collection of translated documents and some thirty articles.

•  television theory, television story-telling: recent works in this field are L’età della televisione (The age of Television: Laterza 2006 and Intellectbooks 2007); Realtà multiple. Concetti, generi e audience della fiction (Multiple realities, Liguori 2004); Le formule del racconto televisivo (The formulae of television story-telling, Sansoni 2002).
•  Italian journalism and journalists, namely from the perspective of gender studies (women and the news, women and the mass media).  Main related works: Visibilità senza potere (Visibility without power, Liguori 2005); Cultura di massa e identità femminile (Mass culture and feminine identity, ERI 1983).

She is currently writing a social history of Italian television drama.

Professor Paul Corner
Professor of European History at the University of Siena

Paul Corner was born in Yorkshire and did his first degree in History at Cambridge. His doctoral thesis, produced at Oxford, was subsequently published as Fascism in Ferrara 1915-25. After various brief research posts in Britian and in Italy he moved to the University of Reading, where he was Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of Italian Society until he resigned in 1987 to take up his present post as Professor of European History at the University of Siena.

For most of the 1980s he abandoned the study of fascism in order to broaden his approach to problems relating to the evolution of Italian agriculture in the context of Italian economic development during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An aspect of this work was the research project on Italian agriculture, funded by the British Academy, which he directed (with Australian John Stuart Macdonald) and which resulted in the publication (with Anna Bull) of Peasants into Entrepreneurs (Berg 1993). Since then he has returned to the study of fascism, now more orientated towards comparative aspects relating to popular opinion under totalitarian systems. Recent articles relating to these questions have appeared in Journal of Modern History (2002) and Contemporary European History (2006). He is married to Giovanna Procacci and lives in Florence and Rome.

Professor Anna De Fina
Georgetown University

Anna De Fina is Assistant Professor of Italian Language and Linguistics and Coordinator of the Italian Language program in the Italian Department at Georgetown University. She holds an M.Phil. in Linguistics from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in Sociolinguistics from Georgetown University. Throughout her career she has combined an interest for language teaching and teacher professional development with a research focus on sociolinguistic issues. Her work has centred on the expression of identity in discourse, narrative, code-switching and other language contact phenomena, and Italian as a Second and Foreign Language. She also has a long-standing interest in the language and identity of Italian immigrants abroad.

Her most recent publications include the book, Identity in Narrative (John Benjamins, 2003), the co-edited volumes Italiano e italiani fuori d’Italia (with F. Bizzoni, Guerra, 2003), Dislocations, Relocations, Narratives of Displacement (with Mike Baynham, St. Jerome, 2005), and the recently published, Discourse and Identity (with D. Schiffrin and M. Bamberg, Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Professor Pierangela Diadori
Università per Stranieri di Siena, Italia.

Pierangela DIADORI (www.siena-art.com/Diadori) è Professore Associato in “Didattica delle Lingue Moderne” presso l'Università per Stranieri di Siena, dove insegna nei corsi di "Teoria e storia della traduzione" e di "Didattica dell'italiano come L2/LS" e dove dirige il Centro DITALS (Certificazione in Didattica dell’Italiano a Stranieri). Oltre a numerosi articoli e capitoli di libri dedicati alla linguistica italiana e alla glottodidattica, ha pubblicato: L'italiano televisivo (Bonacci, Roma 1994), Le varietà dell'italiano (Bonacci, Roma 1998, con C. Coveri e A. Benucci), Senza parole. 100 gesti degli italiani (Bonacci, Roma 19993). Ha scritto anche manuali di italiano per stranieri: Viaggio nel nuovo cinema italiano, (Certosa, Firenze-Atene 1997, con M. Continanza); Pro e contro 1 e 2 (Bonacci, Roma 1997 e 1999, con P. Barki), e ha curato il volume Insegnare italiano a stranieri (Le Monnier, Firenze 2001) per la formazione dei docenti. Dal 2006 dirige la collana La DITALS risponde pubblicata da Guerra (Perugia).

L'attività scientifica di Pierangela Diadori segue i seguenti filoni di ricerca: didattica dell'italiano a stranieri; glottodidattica e nuove tecnologie; aspetti pragmatici della comunicazione e implicazioni didattiche; teoria e tecniche della traduzione. Attualmente sta lavorando a una ricerca sulla qualità della didattica e sul parlato del docente nella classe di italiano L2 e a un progetto internazionale sull’insegnamento del linguaggio giuridico (italiano e tedesco) a studenti stranieri.