About Susan Jacobs
Susan Jacobs is an author, teacher, book reviewer, editor and former lecturer who lives in Auckland, New Zealand. She speaks fluent Italian, having lived in the Umbrian, Tuscan and Veneto regions of Italy for over 10 years. Her passion for her 'second home' is reflected in her two non-fiction books Fighting with the Enemy: New Zealand POWs and the Italian Resistance (Penguin 2003) and In Love and War: Kiwi Soldiers Romantic Encounters in Wartime Italy (Penguin 2012) where she explores the connections between New Zealand soldiers and Italians during World War Two.
Susan's previous academic writings have examined the work of groundbreaking Italian women writers, with a focus on feminist literary theory. Her PhD from the University of Auckland is entitled "Constructing A Woman: Gender, Genre and Subjectivity in The Autobiographical Works of Sibilla Aleramo", while aspects of the mother/daughter relationship in the novels of the Nobel prize-winning Sardinian writer, Grazia Deledda,are discussed in her MA thesis. A conference paper analyses the nineteenth-century travel writer Cristina di Belgioioso's insights into women's lives in Turkish harems.
Her aim is twofold. Firstly, to provide a forum with updated links and information for people interested in knowing more about soldiers' experiences in Italy during WW2. Readers are encouraged to send in their stories which will be considered for publication on this site. Secondly, contact with other researchers into Italian women writers, particularly the above mentioned, is welcomed.
I have recently put some of my poems on the poems page.