Roberto Dainotto is a professor of Italian studies and of literature at Duke University, and teaches courses on modern and contemporary Italian culture. His publications include Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Cornell UP, 2000); Europe (in Theory) (Duke UP, 2007) for which he was awarded the Laura Shannon Prize for Best Book in European Studies (2010); and Mafia: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books, 2015).