Mark Chu

I graduated from the University of Hull (GB) in 1982 with a BA in Italian and subsequently conducted research on modern and contemporary Sicilian literature, for which I was awarded my PhD in 1992. In the intervening years I worked as an English lettore at the Universita' degli Studi di Palermo in Sicily. I joined the Department of Italian, UCC, in 1991 and served as Head of Department 2004-2018 and from 2025 to the present. I supervise research postgraduate students on topics relating to modern and contemporary Italian literature: recently completed theses have dealt with the construction of masculinities in the works of G.A. Borgese, Vitaliano Brancati and Alberto Moravia, on questions of identity in the writings of Emilio Lussu, historical novels by Sicilian women writers, 'History, Crime and Innovation in Italian Narrative at the Turn of the Millennium', female figures in Italian crime fiction, and 'impegno' in the works of Gianni Celati. 

Late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Sicilian narrative; history and literature of Sicily; Italian Cultural Studies; Literature and emigration; Post-Unification Italian literature and society; Detective fiction. My main areas of research and postgraduate supervision are: Sicilian literature from 1870 to the present; Italian crime fiction and English crime fiction set in Italy. Providing cohesion across these two apparently disparate areas is my concern with theoretical questions linked to representation and a cultural studies approach. These, in turn, are reconciled in my work, through a commitment to ethico-political engagement with the text and its intended and unintended meanings, with a deconstructionist method. My research on Sicilian literature has evolved over the years. I originally began with a thematic study of the works of three writers, but subsequently, however, the focus of my research shifted to the very nature of the representation of the region by authors working predominantly in a realist mode and frequently referring to aspects of the island's history. My writings on Sciascia, for example, re-examine his work in the light of post-colonial critical theory, such as that of Said, and establishes the way in which Sciascia's authority is based on a self-referential 'textual attitude'. Through my research on Sciascia, I moved into critical work on the detective genre and I have published, for instance, on essentialism in representations of Italian characters by some Anglophone crime writers, and on leading contemporary Italian authors in the genre, such as Andrea Camilleri, Marcello Fois, Gianrico Carofiglio and Carlo Lucarelli. Common to both threads of my research in this area is my personal focus on the power dynamic between the representing voice and the groups and individuals represented. Most recently, I have been working on contemporary Italian representations of China and the Chinese.