Dr Mario Panico
IAS Residential Fellow
University of Bologna
Mario Panico is a research fellow and adjunct lecturer at the University of Bologna. He is an active member of the research centre “TraMe- Centre for the Semiotic Study of Memory” at the same university. He is a memory studies scholar, and his research lies in the intersection between visual culture, difficult heritage and affect theory. At the moment he is working on two research projects: the first on the relationship between AI images, war imaginaries, cultural heritage and emotions; the second on the representation of genocide perpetrators in visual arts and memory museums.
Prior to this appointment, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Amsterdam (2022-2025). During his PhD, Panico worked on the relationship between nostalgia, urban space and museums, analysing the way space can be used as an “affecting” tool to construct past temporalities in the present. This research resulted in his first book Spaces for Nostalgia. Difficult Memories and Material Consolations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). In the last five years, he has published academic articles on cultural memory theory, semiotics and emotions, difficult heritage and family memory dynamics. He is an editorial board member of the scholarly journals Heritage, Memory and Conflict (HMC), Versus. Journal of Semiotic Studies, and Perpetrator Studies Research (JPR). He has also translated into Italian a volume of work by Marianne Hirsch on postmemory.