Dr Giulia Torello-Hill
Senior Lecturer in Italian - Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education; School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Email: gtorello@une.edu.au
Biography
Giulia Torello-Hill is an internationally renowned expert in the reception of classical Roman drama in the Italian Renaissance. Her research explores the interplay between exegesis of ancient texts, iconographic tradition and performance practices in Renaissance Italy. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and intersects Italian Studies, Renaissance Studies, Classics, Intellectual History, History of the Book, Art History, Visual Culture and History of Theatre. She has made important advances in the knowledge of humanist conceptualisation and the appropriation of ancient poetics and theatrical practices, and how these processes were accelerated though the printing press.
Giulia is the recipient of highly prestigious collaborative grants and international fellowships. She was a Chief Investigator of the ARC Discovery Project Scripts without a stage: Roman Comedy in the Early Italian Renaissance (DP150100974), which challenged the opinion that Terence’s plays were not understood as theatre and investigated the dynamics of change in this key period in relation to ideas of theatre. In 2015-16, she was awarded a Hanna Kiel Research Fellowship at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and in 2018, a residential Renaissance Society of America-Kress Foundation Short-Term Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago. These fellowships are the most coveted in field of Renaissance Studies.
Giulia has published in top-tier scholarly journals and leading academic publishers. Her recent peer-reviewed monograph The Lyon Terence: Its tradition and Legacy - https://brill.com/view/title/36301(co-authored with Andrew J. Turner) presents the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of this ground-breaking first illustrated printed edition of Terence (Lyon 1493). This study looks at the context and the cultural processes that shaped the appropriation of ancient notions of theatre practices.
Giulia is currently working on a new collaborative project (with Jason Stoessel) on the interplay of text, music and mise-en-scène in early vernacular theatre performances at the court of Ercole I d’Este in Ferrara. Using innovative digital humanities research methods and established modes of historical and critical enquiry, this project will generate new knowledge about performance practices and communication networks among patrons, performers and authors.
Her research interests extend to any aspect of Italian literary texts from the Middle Ages to contemporary literature, Renaissance intellectual history, iconography and history of the book and she welcomes enquiries from postgraduate students wishing to work on any of these areas.
