Barbara Pezzotti, PhD (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ), is Senior Lecturer in European Languages at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include crime fiction and popular culture, literary geographies and utopian literature. Her latest monograph is Mediterranean Crime Fiction: Transcultural Narratives in and around the ‘Great Sea’ (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She is also a former journalist and still contributes to Il Sole 24 Ore, the leading economic and financial newspaper in Italy. She is a Dante Alighieri enthusiast and teaches Dante and the Divine Comedy in her Italian Studies and European Studies units at Monash University.