Meriel Tulante is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Thomas Jefferson University, where she is also the Program Director for the Hallmarks Core for General Education. Her research is centered on post-WWII Italy and particularly the ways in which the nation has been imagined through different forms of cultural production. Much of her work has focused on the novelist Sebastiano Vassalli, about whom she recently published Italian Chimeras: Narrating Italy through the Writing of Sebastiano Vassalli (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020). The reimagining of Italy as a nation is also a subject of her investigations into postcolonial authors and narratives in Italian with migration or intercultural encounters at their center. A further area of research interest is the intersection between Italian fashion and film and the way in which these forms of creative expression and cultural commentary participate in the reflection and formation of a national identity.