First a BA, now 40-years on a PhD

First a BA, now 40-years on a PhD

Birkenhead local Eleanor Hamlyn will graduate with her PhD in Italian Studies on Monday, 40-years since she graduated with her BA in English in May 1975.

The University of Auckland’s city campus was a much different place then, without the internet getting books and resources was hard.

“You had to be so organised to make sure you got your resources on time, if you went to the library too late everyone had got before you.”

“Even in the 70s, finding a photocopier was a mission, I think the library had one.”

She also remembers the politically charged nature of the Auckland campus. Eleanor would join thousands of other students in marches against the Vietnam War and for women’s rights.

“Tim Shadbolt was the big presence on campus, he was the leading student activist.”

After her BA Eleanor went on her OE before returning to Auckland to gain an MA, followed by a Postgraduate Diploma in Librarianship. She worked as a research librarian for many years, but in 2003 the bug to return to study came back.

She returned to the university part-time in 2003 and gradually built up enough papers in Italian Studies to undertake the Post Graduate Diploma in Translation Studies, and then a BA Honours in Italian studying the works of Italian author Giorgio Scerbanenco. She continued studying him for her PhD.

She travelled to the town of Lignano Sabbiadoro, on the Adriatic Sea where Scerbanenco had lived and retired before he died in 1969. The town holds the archives of his work and was a pleasant place to conduct her research.

“It was a bit like going to the Coromandel to do your archival research, it was lovely.”

Scerbanenco was an Italian crime writer famous for four crime novels written in the 1960’s. But Eleanor chose to study some of his earlier novels written between 1949 and 1963. A prolific writer, Scerbanenco penned over 80 novels, but little research has been carried out on the bulk of them as they are often dismissed as ‘Romance’.”

However, given his work as an editor of women’s magazines, Scerbanenco had an insight into the hardships facing women in post-war Italy.

“He wrote realistically about women’s lives,” Eleanor says.

“They are labelled as ‘Romance’, and people think ‘that’s beneath me to read’.

“But Romance is like any kind of fiction, there is trash, but there’s also quite strongly written novels.”

Eleanor was even able to interview Scerbanenco’s daughter Cecilia, and gather further details into his life.

She tries to go to Italy as often as she can. Later this year she is returning to visit areas where her father served in WWII, from the area around the River Po up to the northern city of Trieste.

ends

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