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The Guest Scholar of the Finncon 2016 Academic Track is Raffaella Baccolini who works as a Professor of English Literature at the University of Bologna. Professor Baccolini has published several papers on dystopian fiction, which is one of the main themes of the Academic Track this year. Together with Tom Moylan, she has edited two definitive volumes on dystopia and utopia, Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (Routledge 2003) and Utopia-Method-Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming (Peter Lang 2007).
Baccolini obtained her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1989, and has worked at the University of Bologna since 1990. Her areas of specialisation are contemporary and twentieth-century American and English Literature and gender studies. In particular, she has published on women’s literature; humour; feminist criticism; utopia, dystopia and science fiction; modernism; memory and nostalgia; trauma studies; young adults’ literature and cinema. She is co-editor of the series “Ralahine Utopian Studies” (Peter Lang) and of the online journal mediAzioni and a member of MeTRa (Centro di Studi Interdisciplinari sulla Mediazione e la Traduzione a opera di e per ragazze/i).