Sara Pesce teaches film history, film and literature and performance at the University of Bologna. In 2002, she was a Fulbright scholar at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, and in 2001 at Columbia University, Department of English. In 2004 she was visiting fellow at École Normale Supérieure, Passerelle Des Arts, Paris. She has undertaken research on the cultural roots of the Hollywood film industry, on cultural memory and digital culture in the contemporary global context, and on acting, stardom and celebrity culture. On these topics, she has written various articles published in journals and edited collections. She has published books on Hollywood’s Jewish founders (2005. Dietro lo schermo. Gli immigrati ebrei che hanno inventato Hollywood. 1924-1946), World War II cultural memory in Italian Cinema (2008. Memoria e immaginario. La seconda guerra mondiale nel cinema italiano) and the British actor Laurence Olivier and his impact on cinema and television (2012 Laurence Olivier nei film. Shakespeare, la star, il carattere, Recco, Le Mani). She is editor of a work on film melodrama (2007. Imitazioni della vita, il melodramma cinematografico) and editor and contributor of a volume on time and paratextual media on the web: promos, trailers, gadgets, grassroots video production, remixes, forums, archives, and gaming (2015, The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media. Permanence and Obsolescence in Paratexts). Since 2012, she has been curator of a series of public interviews with major Italian actors, held in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna. She is co-founder of the Italian Research Network on Celebrity Culture, an association of scholars who approach the topic of celebrity from an interdisciplinary point of view and organize a biennial international conference.
