ACIS is delighted to announce that Professor Andrea Rizzi has been appointed the new Chair of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies. He leads a renewed Management Committee with several new appointees who start their terms of office this year.

Now entering its third decade of activities, the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies has marked its twentieth anniversary in several ways, including with a reflection on its operations and structure.  Over the past three years, the ACIS Management Committee has engaged in a lengthy process developing a Charter for Governance. Approved in 2021 and formally implemented at its Annual General Meeting in December 2022, it is hoped that the Charter will provide a clearer and more robust approach to daily operations going forward, including membership of the Management Committee and terms of office of its members. 

The Annual General Meeting held in Perth in December 2022 saw the conclusion of service of several long-standing committee members who had voluntarily given of their time and expertise over many years to ensure the continuation of the vision begun by Dino de Poli and the Fondazione Cassamarca's generous philanthropy: Giorgia Alù, Loretta Baldassar, Catherine Dewhirst, Diana Glen, Sally Hill, John Kinder, and Brigid Maher, all concluded their terms of office and ACIS remains deeply grateful to them all.

Their last role was to select the new Management Committee members from the applicants who had responded to an open call for service on the committee. The new members appointed were Andrea Rizzi (University of Melbourne), Mark Seymour (University of Otago), and Barbara Pezzotti (Monash University). For the first time, the ACIS Management Committee also now includes a postgraduate representative to be appointed on an annual basis. The successful applicant for this role was Laura Di Blasi (University of Melbourne). These new appointees all joined those members still serving their terms on the committee:  John Hajek, Carolyn James, and Susanna Scarparo.

Catherine Kovesi has now also concluded her term as Chair. In early 2023 she convened a special meeting of the Management Committee for a new Chair to be appointed from among its ranks. At this meeting  Andrea Rizzi was appointed to serve as Chair, for an initial period of four years.

Catherine Kovesi is incredibly grateful to the ACIS community whose support has enabled her to experience an enriching and rewarding period as Chair serving those who advance Italian Studies in Australasia. Above all she is grateful to Elisabetta Ferrari, the ACIS Project Officer, whose perspicacious, tenacious, and quietly effective personality has assisted her in the running of so many of the operations of ACIS.

New members of the ACIS Management Committee

Andrea Rizzi will be well known to many of the ACIS community. He is the ACIS Cassamarca Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Melbourne and is also currently serving as the Associate Dean, Research for the Faculty of Arts.

Born in Rome and raised in Italy in a bilingual family, Andrea was trained as a scholar and teacher at the Università Statale di Pavia (Italy) and the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK). Before coming to The University of Melbourne (2005), Andrea held positions in the UK, at the University of Western Australia, and at the University of South Australia. Between 2015 and 2019 Andrea was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. In 2010-2011 he was awarded the Harvard University's Deborah Loeb Fellowship at the Villa I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

Andrea is a Renaissance literary and translation history scholar with an interdisciplinary approach to the study of this significant period of European culture: having been trained as a philologist as an undergraduate student at the University of Pavia (Italy), Andrea then developed a focus on premodern and modern transcultural communication and trust. Cultural history, literature, and translation history are therefore the three interconnected streams of Andrea's research.

ACIS looks forward to following Andrea Rizzi and the Management Committee as they lead this special and unique organization into its next decade of activities.