Laura Di Bianco is an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies, whose research and teaching lie at the intersection of twenty-first century Italian cinema, literature, and culture; Women\u2019s and Gender Studies; and Environmental Humanities.<\/p>\r\n
She is Director of Undergraduate Studies in Italian, affiliated faculty member at the Center for Advanced Media Studies (CAMS), and collaborator with the Programs for the Study of Women\u2019s Gender and Sexuality (WGS), and Environmental Science and Studies. Her research on Italian cinema and ecology has been supported by the Lauro De Bosis Fellowship at Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award, and the Bogliasco Fellowship in the Humanities (2020).<\/p>\r\n
Her book\u2014Wandering Women. Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking<\/em><\/a> (Indiana University Press, 2023) explores the work of contemporary Italian women directors from feminist and ecological perspectives.<\/p>\r\n Professor Di Bianco is currently developing a second book project:\u00a0Crumbling Beauty<\/em>.\u00a0 Adopting material ecocritical and post-human perspectives, and bringing film criticism into dialogue with environmental and cultural history, Crumbing Beauty<\/em>\u00a0traces a genealogy of Italian eco-cinema from the silent era to the present. Engaging with the classics, the forgotten, and the emergent, this study sheds light upon a contemporary cinema that addresses Italy's environmental conflicts, while also retrieving prophetic films from the archive that, in their time, when the Anthropocene had not yet been named, exposed social inequalities and abusive environmental practices, but also imagined the world and told stories from non-anthropocentric perspectives.\u00a0Crumbling Beauty\u00a0<\/em>explores how film can help us grapple with global ecological crises and foster a culture of care and change.<\/p>\r\n At Hopkins, she teaches surveys of Italian cinema, freshmen seminars like\u00a0Great Books<\/em>, upper-level undergraduate classes such as Climate Change Narratives<\/em>, and graduate seminars on modern and contemporary Italian literature.<\/p>\r\n She co-curates Global Ecologies<\/em> a series of lectures, workshops, book talks, and film screenings that brings JHU faculty members and students in dialogue with scholars engaged in the field of environmental humanities and artists whose work explores the interplay of the human and non-human world.<\/p>\r\n Professor Di Bianco is co-editor for\u00a0Modern Language Notes: Italian Issue<\/em>\u00a0and has collaborated with the online journal\u00a0Gender| Sexuality| Italy<\/em>.<\/p>"],"ecpt_teaching":[" Upper-level Undergraduate Courses<\/strong><\/p>\r\n Graduate Seminars<\/strong><\/p>\r\n Selection of Classes Taught at Other Institutions<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n
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