Executive Dean of School of Humanities and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor (International)
Giuliana Pieri joined Royal Holloway University of London in September 2000. She is currently Vice-Principal (International) with responsibility for international partnerships and exchange students, and for widening the international experience of our undergraduate students. She is also Executive Dean of the School of Humanities, a position she took on in July 2020, after leading the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (2015-18).
Giuliana benefited from an international education and is committed to widening access to global opportunities for all our students. After completing her Dott. Lett. degree at the University of Pavia, Italy, she moved to the UK to pursue her further studies. She holds an MA in the History and Theory of Art from the University of Kent at Canterbury (1995), and a PhD in Art History from the University of Oxford (1998). She began her university career at Cardiff University before moving to the Department of Italian Studies at Royal Holloway.
Giuliana became Professor of Italian and the Visual Arts in 2016. Her own research and education focuses on 19th and 20th century visual culture, cultural history, and popular literature. She has published widely on Anglo-Italian relations, art and culture in Fascist Italy, postwar Italian fashion and design, and crime fiction. Her research interests are comparative and interdisciplinary, combining a focus on the intersection of the verbal and the visual with curatorial practice and its pedagogical applications. In 2010 she co-curated the exhibition Against Mussolini. Art and the Fall of a Dictator (London, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art). She returned to curatorial practice in 2019 with the exhibition The Making of Modern Italy: Art and Design in the early 1960s (Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London) as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia. She was senior editor of the journal Italian Studies (2016-2021), and is commissioning editor for two Wales University Press book series: European Crime Fictions (2005-) and Studies in Visual Culture (2012-).
