Research: Aesthetics of Nostalgia in the Urban Literature and Cinema of Postcolonial Hong Kong
Marco Sbreglia is a PhD student in English Literatures, Language and Translation at Sapienza, University of Rome, in cotutelle with the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. In 2021, he earned his Bachelor’s degree in European and American Languages, Literatures and Cultures from L’Orientale, University of Naples, with 110 cum laude. In 2023, he received his Master’s degree in English Studies from Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice with 110 cum laude, with a thesis titled "Translating Neapolitan Neorealist Narrative: Anna Maria Ortese’s Il mare non bagna Napoli".
His doctoral research explores how anglophone literature and non-anglophone cinema address the sense of nostalgia arising from Hong Kong’s drastic urban transformations between the 1960s and the 1980s, as well as the cultural consequences of the 1997 handover. More precisely, this research examines how Hong Kong’s urban landscape is continually reshaped by high-tech, futuristic skyscrapers, even as it remains haunted by the lingering memories of the pre-handover era. It seeks to understand how this interplay between rapid modernisation and nostalgic longing shapes and defines emblematic urban spaces and human relationships within the literary and cinematic representations of postcolonial Hong Kong. The study draws on Xu Xi’s anglophone literature alongside the films of Wong Kar-wai.
He is the winner of the Best Paper Award 2025, awarded by the Hong Kong Studies Association and co-sponsored by the British Academy.
He is a member of the Associazione Italiana di Anglistica (Italian Association of English Studies), the European Society for the Study of English, the Postcolonial Studies Association, the Associazione Italiana di Studi sulle Culture e Letterature di Lingua Inglese (Italian Association for the Study of Anglophone Cultures and Literatures), the Centre of Postcolonial and Gender Studies of L’Orientale, University of Naples, and the Hong Kong Studies Association.