Liliana Ellena is Research Associate at the European University Institute in Fiesole (Italy) as part of the ERC Research Project “Bodies Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond“. She has been Research Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen (Germany) and more recently has taught cultural history and women’s and gender history at the University of Turin.

Situated in the fields of postcolonial, gender and cultural studies, her research has focused on interwar Italian cinema, the memory of colonialism in postwar Italy and on transnational approaches to the history of women’s and feminist movements.

In her current research she draws on visual sources in order to map out the historical and cultural processes moulding the relationship between bodies, diasporic spaces and cultural borders in postcolonial Europe. She is particularly interested in how visual and contemporary arts rework the idea of “archive” providing new insights into the performativity of memory.

She has edited the new Italian edition of Franzt Fanon I dannati della terra (Einaudi 2001) and with Alexander Geppert e Luisa Passerini, New Dangerous Liasons. Discourses on Europe and Love in the Last Century, Oxford-New York, Berghahn Books, 2010. Her work has been published on several Italian and international journal and books. Among her most recent works she has published Frontiere della liberazione e snazionalizzazione delle italiane (in Di generazione in generazione. Le Italiane dall’Unità ad oggi, 2014) and edited Movimenti nel Mediterraneo. Relazioni, scambi, conflitti («Zapruder», n. 33, 2014).