Anna Ferrando

Università di Pavia (Italy)

Building the West: literary agents as Italian and American Cold War players

2024–2025: Spring

Anna Ferrando is a tenure-track researcher in Contemporary History (RTD-B) and teaches Transnational History of Culture in Contemporary Italy at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia, Italy. She has published numerous articles in scientific journals on the relationship between publishing and politics from a transnational perspective, her main focus being cultural mediators and mediation in the 20th century. Focusing on these themes are the monograph Cacciatori di libri. Gli agenti letterari durante il fascismo [Book Hunters. Literary Agents under Fascism] (Milan, FrancoAngeli, 2019), which was awarded the SISSCO Prize for “Best Debut Book” by the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History, and the book she edited on translations under Fascism titled Stranieri all’ombra del Duce. Le traduzioni durante il fascismo [Foreigners in the Shadow of the Duce. Translations During Fascism] (Milan, FrancoAngeli, 2019). For the past two years she has devoted herself to the history of the Adelphi publishing house, on which she wrote Adelphi. Le origini di una casa editrice (1938–1994) [Adelphi. The Origins of a Publishing House (1938–1994)] (Rome, Carocci, 2023). She is currently working on media history in the Mediterranean area, with a specific focus on the relations among information, freedom of expression, political power, and diplomacy: her current research focuses on the role of Western news agencies and Arab journalism in Egypt's strategic media hub from the 1920s through the 1950s. She has already published a number of contributions on this topic including “La libertà impossibile. Informazione e potere politico in Egitto (1922–1955) [Impossible Freedom. Information and Political Power in Egypt (1922–1955)],” in Contemporary World, 3/2021, pp. 5–41.