A photo of John Colin Marston

John Colin Marston

Ph.D. Student

E-mail: colinmarston@g.ucla.edu Fields of interest: Italian Studies, Modern Italian Literature (20th Century), German and Italian Jewish History and Culture

John Colin Marston is a PhD candidate in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research focuses on 20th century Italian literature and film, engaging in translation, sexuality and gender, and transnational studies. His dissertation is on the changing forms of Italian censorship from the 1950s-1970s, and explores how poets, writers, and filmmakers such as Umberto Saba, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Liliana Cavani negotiated and contested the meaning of obscenity in an increasingly transnational cultural context.

He has previously published academic articles on the role of painting in postwar Italian fiction for CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism (2026) and the influence of Giovanni Testori on Luchino Visconti’s films in MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities (2025). He has presented at conferences at New York University, the University of London, and the University of Barcelona on camp cinema, translating dialect in Pasolini’s fiction, the problematic role of witness in the fiction of Curzio Malaparte, and decolonial curatorial practices at the Museo delle civiltà. He is also a translator, collaborating with the Pirandello Society of America and contemporary writers and researchers. 

Education

  • B.A. Literary Studies, minors in philosophy and Jewish Studies, The New School, 2017
  • M.S. Journalism, Columbia University, 2018

Selected Publications

Articles

  • “Se una radio è libera, ma libera veramente, mi piace anche di più, perché libera la mente’: The Role of Radio Popolare and the Radio Libere in the Movement of 1977.” NeMLA Italian Studies, vol. 46, forthcoming Fall 2026. 

  • “An Intermedial Phenomenology of Seeing in ‘Neo-Modernist’ Italian Writing: Curzio Malaparte, Giovanni Testori, and the Visual Arts (1944-1960).” CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism, vol. 27, 2026, pp. 89–105. 

  • “Scratching Beneath the Surface of the boom economico: the Scandal of Giovanni Testori’s Segreti di Milano and the Censorship of its Film Adaptation Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1958-1961).” MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, vol. 20, 2025, pp. 25–33.

  • “The ‘Return’ of a Diasporic Hebrew Literary Culture in Berlin.” Jewish Culture and History, vol. 22, 2021, pp. 68–85.

Reviews

  • Stracci sempre per favore le mie lettere: la corrispondenza tra Marta Abba e Luigi Pirandello (1926–1936) con testimonianze inedite, edited by Dina Saponaro and Lucia Torsello (Rome, Bulzoni, 2021); 580 pp.; reviewed in Pirandello Studies, vol. 44, 2024, p. 128-132. 

Translations

  • “A Little Bit of Wine.” Novelle per un anno. Luigi Pirandello, Pirandello Society of America, forthcoming 2026.
  •  “The Rising Sun.” Novelle per un anno. Luigi Pirandello, Pirandello Society of America, 2024. 

Selected Presentations

  • “Fuoriusciti in Exile from Mussolini to Mitterrand: Radical Italian Transnational Exchanges in 20th century Paris”; for the roundtable “Multilingualism and Italian Studies,” Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention, January 2027.  
  • “Mirroring, Hallucination, and Identarian Attachment in Aldo Palazzeschi’s Il codice di Perelà”; for the panel “Before the Algorithm: Generative Storytelling and Emancipatory (Meta)Fictions in Pirandello and Beyond,” Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention, January 2027.  
  • “Beyond Neorealism and the Auteur: Visconti’s Camp Cinema in Ludwig (1973)” (2,300 words); for the panel “Silver Screens,” Camping Italia. Notes on Italian Camp, New York University, October 10, 2025.  
  • “Deformazione e gergo: Tradurre Ragazzi di vita di Pasolini in inglese”; for the panel “Traduzione Fuori Dall’Aula,” Asociación Española de Lengua Italiana y Traducción conference, University of Barcelona, March 27, 2025.  
  • “Decolonizing Memory in the Museo delle opacità: Between Cancellation and Recuperation” (2,200 words); for the panel “Italy’s Multidimensional Forgetting,” Society of Italian Studies biennial conference, Royal Holloway, University of London, June 19, 2024.  
  • “The Obscenity of the Unreliable Narrator: Visualization and an Aesthetic of Shock in Malaparte’s War Prose” (3,740 words); for the panel “Encounters: Malaparte among Arts and Artists,” Curzio Malaparte and the Visual Arts Conference, Istituto Italiano di Cultura di New York and New York University, October 19, 2023.
     
  • Discussant and Organizer, “Democracy and Defeat: Morante, Moravia, and Malaparte in Capri, 1946,” UCLA Department of European Languages Graduate Student Speaker Series, talk by Professor Franco Baldasso (Bard College), April 20, 2023.

Courses commonly taught

  • Italian 1 
  • Italian 2 
  • Italian 3 
  • Italian 46: Italian Cinema and Culture 
  • Italian 50: Masterpieces of Modern Italian Culture          

Invited Talks

  • “The Boundaries of Nature, Social Abandonment, and Ecological Futures in Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro felice,” University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), March 7, 2024.