Paolo LA MARCA
Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Literature in the Department of Humanities at the University of Catania, he specializes in modern and contemporary Japanese literature, with particular focus on the works of Kurahashi Yumiko, whose short stories he edited and translated in the collection The End of Summer and Other Stories (Atmosphere Libri, 2023).
A significant part of his research concerns manga studies and the interrelationships between comics and contemporary Japanese literature. He is the author of the monograph Pop Generation: Literature in the Age of the Mobile Phone (2020) and has published numerous essays on manga in academic journals and edited volumes. Among these are Suggestions, Homages, and Rewritings: When Japanese Comics Meet Western Cinema (2014), Kamimura Kazuo’s Dōsei jidai: A Semiotics of the Image Between Cinema, Comics, and Reality (2019), Perversion Lies in the Eye of the Beholder: Reflections on Censorship in Japanese Comics (2020), and Ero-Gekiga: The Golden Age of Japanese Erotic Comics—A Preliminary Analysis (2024).
He has curated all Italian exhibitions dedicated to Kamimura Kazuo: The Simplicity of Beauty (Lucca, 2016), Love (MAR – Museum of Art of the City of Ravenna, 2023), and Kamimura Kazuo – The Mark of the Senses (Jesi, 2023; Pordenone, 2023–24).
He is the director and editor of Doku, the publishing imprint of the Italian publisher Coconino Press. As a translator, he has worked on titles by, among others, Kamimura Kazuo, Taniguchi Jirō, Maruo Suehiro, Furuya Usamaru, Kago Shintarō, Eguchi Hisashi, Uchida Shungiku, and Nakamura Asumiko.
PARTICIPATION IN RESEARCH PROJECTS
- Prometeo Departmental Project – Line 2 (2019): Classics of Chinese Literature as a Shared Cultural Heritage between China and Japan (Principal Investigator: Prof. Lavinia Benedetti). Research team: Lavinia Benedetti, Paolo Villani, and Paolo La Marca.
- Prometeo Departmental Project – Line 1 (2019): Erotopia: Japanese Erotic Comics of the 1970s (Principal Investigator).
- PIACERI Departmental Project: ATLAS. Rethinking Eastern–Western Imaginaries: Language, Body, Mind.
Participants:
a) DISUM – Rossana Barcellona, Renata G. Gambino, Iain A. Halliday, Paolo La Marca, Grazia Pulvirenti, Concetta Sipione, Paolo Villani, and Raffaele Zago.
b) SDS – Lavinia Benedetti, Luca Capponcelli, and Sabina Fontana. - DIRIS Intradepartmental Project: Disobedient, Rebellious, and Subversive Women in Eastern and Western Literatures from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (Principal Investigator: Prof. Maria Rizzarelli). Research team: Stefania Arcara, Luca Capponcelli, Raffaella Malandrino, Maria Grazia Nicolosi, Floriana Puglisi, Carminella Sipala, and Paolo La Marca.