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Publications

, Misiak Anna, Backman Rogers Anna, Sadri Houman

11 (2023)

Spectatrices! De l’Antiquité à nos jours (2022) (2022)

Romani Gabriella, Fanning Ursula,

(2022)

Con altra voce echi, variazioni e dissonanze nell'espressione letteraria (2022) (2022)

Nineteenth Century Literature Series Nineteenth Century Literature Series (2022)

Partzsch Henriette, , Rapport Michael

(2020)

Teaching

Katharine teaches and supervises across undergraduate and postgraduate taught modules in Journalism, Media and Communication, Italian, and Gender Studies.

She has over twenty years' experience of teaching Italian literature, culture, and language in UK Universities (including Leeds; Warwick; Manchester; Cambridge), and since 2020 she has taught across modules in Gender Studies and Journalism, Media and Communication.

In 2021 Katharine was nominated by her students for a fourth º£½ÇÂÛ̳ Students’ Union Teaching Excellence Award and for a Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in the category Effective Sustained Contribution.

Katharine was External Examiner of the Italian programme at Royal Holloway, University of London between 2022 and 2026, and has externally examined four research dissertations: three MPhils at the University of Glasgow (2019), the University of Birmingham (2022), and the University of Kent (2023)), and one doctoral thesis (at the University of Warwick, 2025). At º£½ÇÂÛ̳, Katharine has examined three doctoral theses and one MPhil thesis.

Katharine has supervised to completion an MRes on 'Denied and Disowned Motherhood in the Works of Annie Ernaux and Dacia Maraini' (2021), and is currently supervising two posgraduate research projects.

Katharine has guest-taught seminars and lectures nationally and internationally at Loughborough University (2026), the University of Oxford (2022), the University of Naples, 'Federico II' (2021), Columbia University, New York (2016), California State University, Long Beach (2014), and Seton Hall University, New Jersey (2014).

Research Interests

Katharine's current project, Before the Credits: Feminist Genealogies and the Making of Italian Women Film Pioneers, 1914-22, argues for a re-evaluation of the origins of early Italian feminist film culture through an intergenerational lens. Drawing on a feminist media archaeological approach (archival material evidence in film and women's journals, as well as accounts of stars and evidence in life writings), she shows how the cohort of women writers and performers working across and between media from the 1880s onwards reveal networks of female solidarity, symbolic motherhood, and creative legitimation.

Katharine's most recent monograph, Ìý(Routledge, 2022), grew out of longstanding research interests first developed during her part-time MA by Research at the University of Leeds, which examined female roles in Italian tragic opera from Rossini to Puccini. After completing her PhD on Italian women writers' nineteenth-century journalism and fiction at the University of Warwick, she further developed these themes during her Junior Research Fellowship at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. ItÌýexamines Italian women as protagonists and consumers of literature, theatre, opera, and film. Using personal writing, journalism, and canonical texts, it analyses female performance and women’s responses. Its interdisciplinary analysis of female relationships involving admiration illuminates a vibrant Italian female culture industry during early feminism.

Katharine's first book, (University of Toronto Press, 2014), adopted a new historicist approach to analyse the domestic fiction and journalism of three of the most significant women writers of the period (La Marchesa Colombi; Neera; Matilde Serao). She showed how in spite of their anti-feminist public declarations, the writers' fiction and journalism intended for women readers offered an implicit feminist intervention and a legitimate means of approaching and engaging with the burning social and political issues of the day regarding the 'woman question'. It won a Finalist place in the Edinburgh Gadda Prize 2019 (Vittorio Group).Ìý

Professional Activities

Participant

9/7/2026

Peer reviewer

7/2026

Editor

30/6/2026

Organiser

18/6/2026

Member of programme committee

5/6/2026

Peer reviewer

6/2026

Projects

Mitchell, Kate (Principal Investigator)

29-Jan-2018 - 28-Jan-2019

Mitchell, Kate (Principal Investigator)

01-Jan-2014 - 31-Jan-2014

Mitchell, Kate (Principal Investigator)

21-Jan-2013 - 31-Jan-2013

Mitchell, Kate (Principal Investigator)

01-Jan-2012 - 25-Jan-2013

Mitchell, Kate (Academic) Wilson, Perry (Principal Investigator) Morris, Penelope (Co-investigator)

Incomparably loving, servant and owner of her children, often tearful but always on her feet holding the family together…Adored, feared and caricatured, in discussions about the Italian family ‘la mamma’ has become a glorious archetype… the enduringly popular image of the Italian mother is of a strong woman who dotes on her son and dedicates herself to him intensively. In exchange she gets the right to veto his choices, his constant attentions and an unrivalled emotional and symbolic dependency.’ (‘Madri fra oppressione ed emancipazione’, in A.Bravo et. al., Storia sociale delle donne nell’Italia contemporanea, 2001, p.78).

The idea of the ‘mamma italiana’ is one of the most widespread and recognisable stereotypes in perceptions of ‘Italian national character’ both within and beyond Italy. This figure (and its effects) makes frequent appearances in jokes and other forms of popular culture, but it has also been seen as having a profound effect on the lived experience of modern-day Italians. ‘Mammismo’ is popularly considered, for example, to be a contributing factor to many of what are perceived as current ‘problems’ with the Italian family including the advanced age at which many Italian ‘children’ (particularly, but not only, sons) leave home, the extremely unequal gender division of labour within Italian households and even Italy’s dramatically low birth rate. In a book published in 2005 (La mamma), Marina D’Amelia raised the very interesting hypothesis that the idea of a particularly strong relationship between Italian mothers and their sons is far from the universal, timeless feature of Italian society that many assume it to be. Instead, she argues, this ambiguous stereotype, which exalts mothers but essentially blames them for many of Italy’s problems, is an example of an ‘invented tradition’, one that was forged just after the Second World War as a means of explaining Italy’s ills. A recent study by Silvana Patriarca (Italian Vices, 2010), moreover, has suggested that this stereotype is part of a wider, long-standing tradition of self-denunciation of ‘defects’ in the ‘Italian character’.

These workshops aim to explore the origins, meaning and influence of the stereotype. They will historicise and contextualise it by examining other, contrasting, ways in which maternity, and the mother-son relationship, have been understood and represented in culture and society over the last century and a half in Italy and its diaspora. The impact on daughters and husbands will also be explored and close attention will be paid to the role of ‘mammismo’ in both the embodied experience and representations of masculine, as well as feminine, identities. There will be particular focus on the way in which the stereotype influences present day debates on the family and on social policy and on the relationship it has with perceptions of Italian ‘national character’.

The workshops aim to open up a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary debate on this often joked about, but rarely seriously discussed, deep-rooted part of the Italian national psyche. By bringing together persons primarily interested in representation with those interested in lived experience and in social policy we aim to help formulate ideas which will give social policy-makers new insights.

09-Jan-2012 - 13-Jan-2014