Ann Caesar is Professor of Italian and serving in her third year as Chair of the Board of the Faculty of Arts. She began her professional career as an extra-mural lecturer in European Literature and Women's Studies for the Workers' Educational Association and the University of Kent before taking up a University Lectureship in Italian at Cambridge in 1984 where she was Fellow at Corpus Christi College. She moved to Warwick in 1999 to the University's first Chair in Italian Studies. Her particular interests are in 18th, 19th and 20th century Italian narrative and theatre and European avant-gardes. She has recently completed a cultural history of Italian literature and is currently working on the origins of the modern Italian novel.