As part of the Trust’s agreement with Cambridge University that it should host our collection of original PoW escape stories and other materials, we decided to fund a two/three-year post-doctoral research project on some aspect of the Italian PoW/helper story. The project will be under the supervision of Professor Robert Gordon, the Serena Professor of Italian at Cambridge, who specialises in the modern literature, cinema and cultural history of Italy.
The research opportunity was widely publicised within the academic community, and we received 17 applications (from candidates in Italy, UK, Ireland and America), many of whom presented highly impressive CVs, detailed and nicely articulated project proposals, and impressive engagement with the requirements of the role and the interests of the Trust.
Of these, five were selected for interview by a panel led by Professor Gordon and which included Professor Phil Cooke (our Chair-elect) and Nick Young, our outgoing Chair, in a non-academic advisory role. All five candidates performed strongly at interview, with three standing out as excellent. After much discussion, Ruth Murphy, who has recently completed a PhD, was selected, and we are very much looking forward to working with her and Professor Gordon when she starts in the new year.
Below, Ruth describes her approach to the MSMT research project and summarises her academic career to date.
“I am very excited to be starting this post-doctoral position which the Trust has generously funded. My project is entitled ‘Connecting tunnels. An integrated narrative of PoW stories’. The central idea is to intersect the Trust’s rich collection of PoW stories and their helpers; ‘tunnels’ which often quite literally intersected!
“The proposed book will bring together many different voices from the period into a coherent narrative, and crucially, give the story over entirely to its protagonists. Such an approach has both literary and historical value. It shows how the same historical event is lived quite differently among those involved; it provides an immersive experience of the past (by eliminating the author’s ‘voiceover’) and it also has a vibrant comic value.
“Finally, as part of the work in collating these PoW/helper testimonies, I propose to write a historical analysis of the role of Italian women in helping Allied PoWs, and to further enhance the map on the MSMT website by connecting each PoW account to its geographical itinerary. In this way, the myriad ‘connecting tunnels’ can be found and explored by all those who have an interest in this period and its history.
“With regard to my previous work, my interests are in post-war Italian literature, Italian fascism, Holocaust Studies, and more broadly, the relationship between ethics and history, feminism, and 20th century intellectual history. My PhD at the University of Cambridge was entitled ‘Ethical Vision in the Twentieth Century: Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin’, supervised by Professor Gordon.
“My doctoral thesis examined two ethical concepts which arose as responses to the Holocaust and have since made their way into our shared moral vocabulary: Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’, inspired by her portrait of Adolf Eichmann (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963), and Levi’s ‘grey zone’ (The Drowned and the Saved/I sommersi e i salvati, 1986), the term he uses to describe the insufficiency of traditional categories of good and evil in the Nazi concentration camps. My work connected, for the first time, these two texts to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), and a series of other foundational writings of the twentieth century, articulating the ethical vision they form together. Finally, it conceptualised a style of writing I call ‘bifocal’: a hybrid, non-fiction genre that combines techniques of literature, philosophy, journalism and testimony, integrating personal experience with general reflection.
“In January 2024, I began a post-doctoral position at the University of Sheffield, as part of the Life Worth Living Project. Life Worth Living, affiliated with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, is both an academic network and a pedagogical approach that advocates deep thinking about life through engagement with philosophical and religious traditions. I have published work on the relationship between philosophy and literature (New Literary History, 2024); Elsa Morante’s World War Two epic La Storia (Annali d’italianistica, 2024), and the affinities between Primo Levi and James Baldwin, for an upcoming volume on Levi’s legacy (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2025).”