Mitchell Katharine Dr

Contact Details

Biographical Summary

Before joining the Faculty Kate Mitchell was Sutasoma Research Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge (2008-2011). She studied Italian with French at the University of Leeds (1999), where she was also awarded an MA by research (2002). She completed her PhD on nineteenth-century Italian women writers (La Marchesa Colombi, Neera, Serao) at the University of Warwick in 2007.

Research Interests

Kate Mitchell’s main research interests are strongly interdisciplinary in method and subject, focusing on representations of gender and sexuality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative, Italian narrative, women between the public and private spheres in early post-unification Italy (as actors, singers, artists, writers), Italian feminism, and nineteenth-century Italian tragic opera, theatre and early cinema.

She has published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles on these topics and has co-edited a supplement to The Italianist 30:3 on Neera with Professor Catherine Ramsey-Portolano (American University of Rome). Her latest publication is a collection of essays on women and gender in late nineteenth-century Italy with Dr Helena Sanson (University of Cambridge), and she is currently co-editing a volume on the figure of the diva in modern Italian culture with Professor Clorinda Donato (California State University, Long Beach). Her monograph, Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870-1910, will be published in 2014 with the University of Toronto Press.

She is currently one of three Core Group Members of an AHRC-funded network grant entitled 'La Mamma: Interrogating a National Stereotype'
http://lamammaitaliana.wordpress.com/ and recently won a British Academy Small Research Grant to carry out archival work in Italy for a new project on female theatregoers and spectators in early post-Unification Italy, 1870-1910.

Before becoming an academic Dr Mitchell worked for two years in arts administration at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and Opera Australia in Sydney and Melbourne, and as a TEFL teacher in Italy and Finland.

She is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and co-ordinates the Languages & Literatures Research Seminars Series in the School of Humanities http://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/schoolofhumanities/newsevents/



Teaching

She teaches an Honours course entitled ‘Women, Celebrity Culture and Emancipation in Post-Unification Italy’, a third-year Studies course on ‘Italian Stage and Screen’, as well as first and second-year Studies and third and final-year language classes. She supervises PhDs on nineteeth and twentieth-century Italian culture, including women's studies and gender studies, narrative fiction, theatre, opera and early film, and teaches an option on 'Women Writers of the Anglo- and Italospheres in the Long Nineteenth Century' for the MLitt in Literature, Culture and Place.

Selected Publications

Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870-1910 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming in 2014)

''Sorelle in arte (e politica)': the 'Woman Question' and Female Solidarity at the fin de siècle', in Women and Gender in Post-Unification Italy: Between Private and Public Spheres, eds. Katharine Mitchell and Helena Sanson (Oxford: Peter Lang, forthcoming in 2013)

''Making the world weep'? Decapitation/Castration in Puccini's Turandot' in Romance Studies 30:2 (2012), 97-106

‘Neera’s Refiguring of Hysteria as nervosismo in Teresa (1886) and L’Indomani (1890)’, in 'Rethinking Neera', eds. Katharine Mitchell and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, supplement to The Italianist, 30:3 (2010), 101-122