Dr. Edward Allen
edwardjosephfrank.allen@unipd.it
Dr Edward Allen, the project’s principal investigator, has a background in literary studies and media history. He is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College. He has held research fellowships at the Library of Congress (Washington DC), the Huntingdon Library (San Marino, California), Jesus College (Cambridge), and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (Cambridge).
Edward has written essays about telephones, church bells, and talking books, among other things; and he has published and edited books about poetry and sound technology, forms of lyric expression, and the intersection of fiction, disability, and the hearing sciences. He is currently researching a book provisionally titled ‘The BBC’s Italian Renaissance’ – among those to feature will be Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Ezra Pound, Robert Rietti, and Ariella Reggio – and he’s collaborating too on a couple of special journal issues connected with the ‘Radio Waves’ project: one on youth culture and trans-European radio, and the other on the politics of broadcasting in and around Greece at midcentury
Dr. Ester Lo Biundo
ester.lobiundo@unipd.it
Ester Lo Biundo (PhD in History, University of Reading, 2017) is a Modern transnational historian specialised in media and the relationship between politics and popular culture. During her PhD she has worked as a sessional lecturer for the History Department of the University of Reading. In 2015 she was awarded an AHRC fellowship at the Kluge Centre of the Library of Congress (Washington, DC). Over the last decade, Ester has developed an expertise in public engagement and divulgation of academic research by working both in Italy and the UK for the following industries: universities, schools, museums, archives, documentary and film production companies.
As part of this project at the University of Padua, Ester will investigate the ways in which teen-agers and young adults accessed and received British music and popular culture, thanks to BBC and RAI radio broadcasts (1945-90s). Building on the outcomes of her book entitled London Calling Italy. BBC broadcasts during the Second World War (Manchester University Press, 2022), her aim is to understand how transnational shared cultural identities were created by global media, starting from the end of the Second World War. The initial outcomes of this research will be published as part of a journal special issue on youth and radio she is currently co-editing with Dr Edward Allen.
Dr. Fiona Antonelaki
persefonianna.antonelaki@unipd.it
Fiona Antonelaki graduated with a B.A. in History and Archaeology from the University of Athens (2011) and a Ph.D. in Modern Greek Literature from King’s College London (2018). She has held teaching and research positions at Princeton University (2019-2021) and the University of Thessaly (2021-2023).
Her work focuses on twentieth-century Greek literature and/in performance, with a special interest in radio and audio culture, archival research, and the relationship between modernism and mass culture. She has published articles on the role of modernist writers in Greek radio programming (Best Essay Prize in Memory of Panagiotis Moullas, 2016), the literary productions of the Greek National Theatre, and the poetry recordings of George Seferis. Her current book project explores the history of the BBC Greek Section as a platform for the promotion of Greek modernism. She currently serves as reviews editor of the Journal of Greek Media & Culture.
What a team, what a project – congrats!
Thanks, Vassili! That’s very kind. We’ve been discovering lots of opportunities for collaboration – future collaboration – so I hope our paths might cross at some point.