Stephen Gundle

He has held several visiting professorships in France including at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (SciencesPo). Between 2009-14 and 2015-16 he was chair of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy. In 2004 he was made an Ufficiale dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic).

Between 1984 and 1988, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. He was appointed as a Tutorial Fellow in Politics at University College, Oxford in 1989. In 1993, he took up a post at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he rose to become Professor of Italian Cultural History. In 2007, he left to become Professor of Film and Television Studies at Warwick. Gundle's interests have been mainly focussed on politics and mass culture in 20th century Italy. After researching the cultural policies of the Italian Communist Party, he focussed on the history of Italian cultural industries and especially cinema. He was principal investigator on large AHRC-backed research projects into the cult of personality of the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and into the practices of Italian film producers in the postwar decades. He has authored studies of the star system of Italian cinema in the Fascist and postwar periods, a history of the relationship between feminine beauty and Italian national identity, and an investigation into the background to the Wilma Montesi murder scandal in 1950s Rome. He also co-wrote, with the Italian designer Clino Trini Castelli, an analysis of the material culture of glamour, and authored the first history of glamour practices of Italian film producers in the postwar decades.

Stephen Gundle (Leicester, England, November 23, 1956), is a British cultural historian and film scholar. He is a Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. He is best known for his books and articles on Italian culture, politics and the mass media.