Derek Duncan is Professor of Italian at the University of St Andrews. His research on modern Italian literature and film explores the intersections of sexuality/gender and of race/ethnicity. He has worked extensively on issues connected to migration to and from Italy and on Italy’s colonial and postcolonial culture. His current project funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship draws on a diverse body of creative work about the sinking of two vessels almost seventy-five years apart in very different places and circumstances to invoke the complex, transcolonial histories of the Italian diaspora.  He is a founding editor of two major book series with Liverpool University Press Transnational Italian Cultures and Transnational Modern Languages for which he co-edited  the open access core text, Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook, a collection of more than 30 essays written for undergraduates exploring key aspects of Modern Languages from a cross-cultural perspective.