University of Padua

Donatella Possamai is Full Professor of Russian Literature at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies at the University of Padua, and Deputy Director of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Contemporary Russia and its Cultural Heritage (CiRRCEC). A specialist in contemporary studies, she focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Russian literature and culture. She is the author of numerous articles on contemporary Russian literature. Her major contributions include Che cos’è il postmodernismo russo? Cinque percorsi interpretativi and Al crocevia dei due millenni. Viaggio nella letteratura russa contemporanea. She is currently the coorfinator of the University of Padua research unit within the PRIN 2022 project From Post-Trauma to Ecology: Contemporary Gender Narratives in Slavic Cultural Texts.

Dmitry Novokhatskiy is a Type B Researcher at the University of Padua. He has held research and teaching positions as Associate Professor at the Crimean University for the Humanities, and has taught at several Italian universities, including Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the University of Bologna, the University of Macerata, the University of Catania, and Roma Tre University. With a background in both Slavic and English Studies, his research focuses on contemporary Russian literature (post-1991), theoretical issues in literary postmodernism, traditional and contemporary historical novels, utopia and dystopia, as well as Soviet and post-Soviet science fiction. He is the author of three monographs, including Salvare il passato: la cronocorrezione nella letteratura russa, published in 2023.

Monica Fin is Associate Professor of Serbian and Croatian Language and Literature at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies at the University of Padua. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Belgrade (2013), research fellow at the University of Padua (2014-2016), and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Novi Sad (2015-2016). Her research focuses on the cultures and literatures of the post-Yugoslav space, and includes the following themes: 18th-century Serbian literature and culture; the history of publishing and the book in the South Slavic world; confessional history in Venetian Dalmatia; premodern Croatian literature within the broader European cultural space; the autobiographical genre in Serbian and Croatian literary traditions; and women's writing in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space. She has published her research findings in both Italian and international volumes and journals. She is the author of Centri srpske kulture XVIII veka (2015).

Neira Merčep graduated in Arts and Humanities from the University of Padua and pursued a second-level Master's degree in Linguistic and Cultural Mediation at Sapienza University of Rome. She returned to Padua for her PhD in Linguistic, Philological, and Literary Sciences, which she completed in 2012 with a dissertation entitled Ante Tomić: Hrvatska sadašnjica kroz prizmu novinarstva i književne obrade. She is a contract lecturer in Serbian and Croatian Literature at the University of Turin and a subject expert in the same field at the University of Padua. Her main research interests focus on contemporary literature emerging from war and the literary processing of wartime trauma, with particular attention to the questions of memory, post-memory, and the construction of personal and collective identity. Her work also explores postmodern Croatian drama, politically engaged post-Yugoslav poetry, and queer literature. For over thirty years, she has been involved in specialized translation from Croatian into Italian and vice versa (legal, medical, and technical fields), and occasionally translates literary works. She actively participates in public presentations of post-Yugoslav authors, serving as interpreter and/or moderator. She lives in Padua with her son and a beloved dog.