Biography

Guido Bartolini is a FWO Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University, where he works on the cultural memory of Fascism in Italian literature and the idea of responsibility for the past. Dr Bartolini is a scholar of cultural memory studies interested in the legacy of dictatorships and World War II in both national and transnational perspectives. His research concerns issues of complicity and implication and the role of literature in constructing reader awareness of past injustices. He is the author of The Italian Literature of the Axis War: Memories of Self-Absolution and the Quest for Responsibility (Palgrave 2021), translated in Italian by Carocci in 2024. He is the co-editor of the “Annali d’Italianistica” 2023 issue, Fascism in Italian Culture: 1945-2023, and the co-editor of Mediating Historical Responsibility: Memories of ‘Difficult Pasts’ in European Cultures (De Gruyter 2024). Dr Bartolini is the co-chair of the Memory and Literature Working Group of the Memory Studies Association (MSA).

Dr Bartolini studied at University of Florence and University of Oxford, and he obtained his PhD from Royal Holloway University of London. Before joining Ghent University, he worked as a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork. In the academic year 2020-2021, Dr Bartolini curated the interdisciplinary seminar series ‘Mediated Memories of Responsibility’ hosted by the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory of IMLR (now ILCS). In the academic year 2021-2022, he curated the online Symposium and Seminar Series “Cultural Memory of Past Dictatorships: Narratives of Implication in a Global Perspective”. At Ghent University, he organised the international conference “Complicities in the Second World War: Literature of Occupation, Collaboration, and Impure Resistance”

Contact

Department of Literary Studies
Ghent University
Blandijnberg 2
9000 Ghent

Email: Guido.Bartolini@Ugent.be