Laura Di Bianco

Johns Hopkins University (USA)

Crumbling beauty: an environmental history of Italian cinema

2025–⁠2026: Spring

Laura Di Bianco is assistant professor of modern and contemporary Italian studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of film studies, women’s and gender studies, and environmental humanities. She is the author of Wandering Women. Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking (Indiana University Press, 2023) and essays that have appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals such as The Italianist, California Italian Studies, Film and Philosophy, ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment), and edited volumes, among which are Waste and Discard Studies in the Mediterranean (Peter Lang, 2024) and Ecologia e lavoro (Mimesis, 2023). She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including the Lauro De Bosis Fellowship at Harvard University, the Bogliasco Fellowship in the Humanities, the JHU’s Catalyst Award (2020), and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute Fellowship (2024–⁠2025).

Laura is also co-editor of the academic journal MLN, Italian (Modern Language Notes).

At the Italian Academy she will be working on her second book project, Crumbling Beauty, An Environmental History of Italian Cinema. Engaging with classic, forgotten, and emergent Italian films, from the silent era to the present, this book will retrieve forgotten memories of traumatic events, reactivate the history of environmentalism and renew vision for the struggle against the climate crisis. 

More information: krieger.jhu.edu/modern-languages-literatures/directory/laura-di-bianco/