Dr Katharine Mitchell

Senior Lecturer

Journalism, Media and Communication

Contact

Back to staff profile

Personal statement

Kate is an interdisciplinary feminist cultural studies researcher of modern Italy, working across and between literature, theatre, opera and film from the late nineteenth- and the early twentieth-centuries. She studies actual and imagined women performers, (screen)writers, readers, spectators, through close reading and analysis of their texts, including archival materials, such as journals, newspaper cuttings, letters, and diaries, and draws on a range of studies and theoretical frameworks in literature, film, media, theatre, and opera (e.g., new historicism, and feminist literary and media theory) to interpret her findings. Kate has published widely in journals such as Italian Studies, The Italianist, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Romance Studies, and Rethinking History.

Her 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 archeological 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.

Kate's books and edited volumes include Gender, Writing, Spectatorships: Evenings at the Theatre, Opera and Silent Screen in Late Nineteeth Century Italy and Beyond (Routledge, 2022), Matilde Serao: International Profile, Reception, and Networks (Classiques Garnier, 2022, co-edited), Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870-1910 (University of Toronto Press, 2014), Women and Gender in Post-Unification Italy (Peter Lang, 2013, co-edited), and special issues (co-edited) of Italian Studies on The Diva in Modern Italian Culture and Rethinking Neera for The Italianist (2015 and 2010 respectively).

Kate is a member of the Italian Girlhood Studies Research Network, a group of researchers dedicated to the discussion and study of girlhood in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian culture. The network was created by the AHRC-funded project (2021-24) 'A Girls' Eye View: Girlhood on the Italian Screen Since the 1950s' led by Professor Danielle Hipkins (University of Exeter) and Dr Romana Andò (University of Rome, La Sapienza).

In 2019 Kate co-founded the Interdisciplinary Network for Nineteenth-Century Italian Studies - Ottocentismi with three colleagues in the United States (at Seton Hall University, New Jersey; Florida State University, and City University, New York) and sits on its Executive Board.

In 2018 she was Principal Investigator of a Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded collaborative project with the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland on Scottish and European transnational exchanges in the long nineteenth century. Her workshops established the Scottish Network for Nineteenth-Century European Cultures under the Scottish Archaeological Research Framework which is housed at National Museums of Scotland. 

Kate has held Visiting Fellowships at five international institutions: Loughborough University (2026); University of Oxford (Harris Manchester College, Michaelmas Term, 2022 & Trinity Term, 2019; St. Catherine's College, Hilary Term, 2019); Seton Hall University, New Jersey, United States (2014); California State University, Long Beach, United States (2014); and the University of Bologna, Italy (2014).

Kate sits on the Editorial Board of Italian Studies and the Advisory Board of Gender/Sexuality/Italy. She was a member of the AHRC's Peer Review College from 2012 to 2020, and from 2020 to 2026 she served two terms on the Society for Italian Studies Executive Committee as Membership Secretary. Between 2017 and 2021 she regularly discussed equality, diversity and inclusion issues on BBC Radio Scotland.

At Strathclyde, Kate is the Deputy Director of Postgraduate Research for the Department of Humanities (until 2027) and a member of the University's Feminist Network.

Kate is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. 

Postgraduate Research Students

Emma Ottanelli (PhD Candidate, SGSAH(AHRC)-funded), 'Weaving a Web of Peace Across Borders: Transnational Connections in Feminist Anti-Nuclear Resistance at "La Ragnatela" and Greenham Common Women's Peace Camps', (2024 - );

Michelle Esrig-Munguia (MRes Candidate): 'Recasting Fantasy with Feminism: Twenty-First Century Romantic Fantasy Fiction', (2025 - ).

Postgraduate Research Completions

Francesca Masciullo, 'Denied and Disowned Motherhood in the Works of Dacia Mariani and Annie Ernaux' (Awarded in 2021)

Kate welcomes PhD/MRes/MPhil enquiries for supervision on any aspect of gender, media, and feminism since the 1880s, particularly in relation to the following areas: 

  • Spectatorships/audiences/readers;
  • Celebrity culture;
  • Feminist media history;
  • Screenwriters and the female gaze.

Back to staff profile

Teaching

Kate 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 Kate was nominated by her students for a fourth Strathclyde Students’ Union Teaching Excellence Award and for a Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in the category Effective Sustained Contribution.

Kate is External Examiner on the Italian programme at Royal Holloway, University of London (2022-26 ), and has externally examined four theses: three MPhils at the University of Glasgow (2019), the University of Birmingham (2022), and the University of Kent (2023)), and one doctoral thesis (University of Warwick, 2025). At Strathclyde, Kate has examined three doctoral theses and one MPhil thesis.

Kate 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.

Kate 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).

Back to staff profile

Research Interests

Kate'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.

Kate's most recent monograph, Gender, Writing, Spectatorships: Evenings at the Theatre, Opera and Silent Screen in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy and Beyond (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. It examines 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.

Kate's first book, Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870-1910 (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). 

Professional Activities

Italian Studies (Journal)
Peer reviewer
6/2025
Modern Italy : Journal of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy (Journal)
Peer reviewer
6/2025
MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities (Journal)
Peer reviewer
5/2025
External Examiner at the University of Warwick for a thesis titled 'Women and the Nation in Early Italian Cinema: 1905-1914'
External Examiner
1/2025
Forum Annuale delle Studiose di Cinema e Audiovisivi (Annual Forum for Women Researchers of Cinema and Audiovisual Media), University of Sassari, Italy
Invited speaker
10/2024
Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference, University of London, Royal Holloway
Invited speaker
19/6/2024

More professional activities

Projects

Establishing SNNEC: Scottish and European Exchanges Then (1780-1914), and Now
Mitchell, Kate (Principal Investigator)
29-Jan-2018 - 28-Jan-2019
Women at the Theatre: Writers as Spectators in Post-Unification Italy (1861-1914)
Mitchell, Kate (Principal Investigator)
01-Jan-2014 - 31-Jan-2014
Women at the Theatre: Writers as Spectators in Early Post-Unification Italy, 1861-1914
Mitchell, Kate (Principal Investigator)
21-Jan-2013 - 31-Jan-2013
Divas and Female Theatregoers in Italy’s Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1914)
Mitchell, Kate (Principal Investigator)
01-Jan-2012 - 25-Jan-2013
La Mamma: Interrogating a National Stereotype
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

More projects

Back to staff profile

Contact

Dr Katharine Mitchell
Senior Lecturer
Journalism, Media and Communication

Email: katharine.mitchell@strath.ac.uk
Tel: 444 8202