Gigliola Sulis is an Associate Professor of Italian in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds. Over the years she held various leadership roles, including Director of Italian, Director of Italian and Classics, Grant Advisor, and School Residence Abroad Coordinator. For six years, she was the elected Honorary Secretary of the Society for Italian Studies in the UK and Ireland (SIS), and then the Italian representative in the Executive Committee of the University Council of Modern Languages (UCML).
Her research is devoted to modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture, with a special focus on issues of diversity and marginality as expressed in multilingual texts and in regional and minority literatures, as well as in women’s writing. She has also written on the literary canon, modern dialect poetry, crime fiction, and 20th-century Italian history, with a main focus on the Resistance and on social unrest of the 1970s.
She is a Senior Co-Editor of the academic journal The Italianist, a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and the founder and director of Livitaly. Bringing Italian Culture to Yorkshire – a programme of knowledge-transfer events that since 2008 has forged international collaborations with Italian writers, translators, publishers, and artists.
Inspired by principles of collaborative leadership, she aims at supporting research in the field of Languages and Cultures and showcasing its value, in academia as well as for the broader culture, society and economy. Key areas of her work will be: encouraging cross-collaboration with in-person events and an enhanced digital presence; seeking and allocating funding (with attention for PGRs, ECAs, EDI); conveying the UCFL’s position in national and international conversations, and having a pro-active role in strategic consultations.
