Stephen Gundle

Stephen Gundle was born in Leicester. He studied Politics at Liverpool University and at the State University of New York in Binghamton, New York, before subsequently undertaking a PhD on the "Italian Communist Party and the cultural sphere" at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Paul Ginsborg.^[2]

Between 1984 and 1988, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.^[3] He was appointed as a Tutorial Fellow in Politics at University College, Oxford, in 1989. In 1993, he took up a post at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he rose to become Professor of Italian Cultural History.^[4] In 2007, he left to become Professor of Film and Television Studies at Warwick. Gundle's interests have been mainly focussed on politics and mass culture in 20th century Italy. After researching the cultural policies of the Italian Communist Party,^[5] he focussed on the history of Italian cultural industries and especially cinema. He was principal investigator on large AHRC-backed research projects into the cult of personality of the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini^[6] and into the practices of Italian film producers in the postwar decades.^[7] He has authored studies of the star system of Italian cinema in the Fascist and postwar periods, a history of the relationship between feminine beauty and Italian national identity, and an investigation into the background to the Wilma Montesi^[8] murder scandal in 1950s Rome. He also co-wrote, with the Italian designer Clino Trini Castelli, an analysis of the material culture of glamour, and authored the first history of glamour practices of Italian film producers in the postwar decades.^[9]

Ha ocupado varios puestos de profesor visitante en Francia, incluyendo el Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (SciencesPo). ^{[ 10 ]} Entre 2009-14 y 2015-16 presidió la Asociación para el Estudio de la Italia Moderna . ^{[ 11 ]} En 2004 fue nombrado Ufficiale dell'Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (Oficial de la Orden del Mérito de la República Italiana). ^{[ 12 ]}