Monica Boria

After completing my first degree in Modern Foreign Languages in Italy, I continued my post graduate education in Britain in the field of Italian Studies and embarked on an academic career in Higher Education. I have taught and lectured in Italian Departments and Language Centres in several UK universities (Birmingham, Leicester, Anglia Ruskin, Nottingham Trent, Cambridge), developing expertise in the areas of Italian language teaching, translation and Italian cultural studies and film, with a predominant focus on post-unification and 20^th century Italian history and culture.

I am passionate about literature, language teaching and translation, and I have obtained several Language Teaching and Translation qualifications over the years from both British and Italian universities. I have also translated academic and literary works for Italian and international publishers (ETS, Elsevier, Peter Lang, Palgrave) and online journals. I have co-organised a series of  seminars and a conference on the theory and practice of translation (Cambridge Conversations in Translation), and I am one of the foundig editors of the scholarly journal Il Pietrisco, and co-editor of its translation section. I am currently co-organising a conference on 'Translation and Language Education in the Age of AI' to take place at Manchester in April 2025.

My abiding interest in books and learning has prompted my more recent work with libraries (in Cambridge), and with library studies in general, as documented in my blog The accidental library apprentice. I have also created the Italian book club Lettrici a Cambridge e oltre.

My research interests lie predominantly in 20^th century Italian literary culture, translation, and humour studies. From my early work on contemporary comic writer Stefano Benni, the Italian counterculture movements of the late 60s and 70s and popular culture, I moved on to investigate the intersection of humour and politics in contemporary Italian society, particularly through television parody and satire from the1980s and, more recently, contemporary multicultural film comedy. My interest in translation as a research field is complemented by my own translation work. My most recent publications in this area are the joint editorship of an innovative volume on translation and multimodality, the first Italian edition of a collection of short stories by modernist writer Dorothy Edwards, and the translation of poems by contemporary writer Madhur Anand. Some of my publications can be accessed on my Academia.edu profile.