Professor Stephen Gundle (Warwick)
My research interests lie in the fields of film and cultural and political history with a special emphasis on Italian cinema and other media. I have written about the Italian star system and relations between the media, politics and consumption from Fascism to the present. Recently, I directed a large AHRC research project on the personality cult of Benito Mussolini. I have also written two books about the history of glamour in Europe and the United States.

Dr Karl Schoonover (Warwick)
My research explores the relationship of cinema aesthetics to political change. I am also interested in the history of film theory, particularly its engagement with questions of realism, temporality, excess, obscenity, and the photographic image. My first book Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema explores how Neorealist films used images of suffering to reconstitute the idea of the human, to recalibrate the scale of human community, and to endorse a foreign spectator as a necessary moral onlooker.

Dr Stefano Baschiera (Queen's, Belfast)
My work on European cinema and film industries has been published in a variety of edited collections and journals including Film International, Bianco e Nero, Italian Studies and The New Review of Film and Television Studies. I am writing a monograph on Bertolucci’s cinema for Berghahn Books and I am the co-editor with Russ Hunter of the book Italian Horror Cinema with Edinburgh University Press.

Christopher Wagstaff †
A long-time member of the Modern Languages faculty at the University of Reading, Wagstaff was a world-renowned expert in the Italian cinema industry. He lectured and published extensively on many aspects of Italian cinema in both the UK and abroad. While essential to the conception of the Producers Project and instrumental at its early stages, Wagstaff passed away before its completion.

Dr Barbara Corsi

My research has for many years been concerned with producers, production companies and producton practices in Italian cinema. I am the author of Con qualche dollaro in meno: storia economia del cinema italiano (2001) and Produzione e produttori (2012) as well as numerous articles and several chapters in the multi volume Storia del cinema italiano and Gian Piero Brunetta's Storia del cinema mondiale as well as the recent Blackwell Companion to Italian Cinema, edited by Frank Burke.

Dr Vanessa Roghi
I am a historian and director of historical documentaries. My research lies in the field of television and Italian cultural history. My last book is Televisione, edited with Damiano Garofalo. For the research project The Cult of Mussolini I realized three video essays: one about the cult in the twenties and thirties, one about Predappio and one about the post war period. In this project I will realize a film about the iconic figure of the Produttore in Italian Society.

Dr Marina Nicoli
My research focuses on the economic history of Italian cinema. I am particularly interested in the relationship between film industry development and state policies, as well as issues like international co-productions, distribution practices and the cultural legitimacy of creative industries. My first book, The rise and fall of the Italian film industry, traces the industry from its origins in the 19th century to its worldwide success in the 1960s, and its subsequent rapid decline. My research has also appeared in peer-reviewed journals like Business History Review and Enterprise and Society.

Dr Sara Verrini, archivist

I am an expert on archive management and the cataloging of primary documents. In recent years, I worked mainly with the preservation of archives for political parties, including but not limited to the preservation, organisation, cataloguing, and creation of finding aids for the following collections: the archives of Italian Communist Party - Federation of Bologna, the archives of the Democratic Party of the Left - Federation of Modena, and the archives of the Christian Democracy - Federation of Modena. In addition to my work on party archives and the producers project, I am also an experienced cataloger of poster collections and have arranged the poster holdings of the Antonian Friars Minor of Bologna. I also produced a finding aid for this collection. For the last few years, I have worked as the records manager of St. Orsola Malpighi hospital center in Bologna.