April Child - Librarian
April Child, MA, joined the British Institute as Librarian in September 2005. A graduate of German at London University she went on to do her MA in Library and Information Studies. She has previously worked as a Librarian in Berlin, Paris and London.
Paris O'Donnell - Librarian (maternity cover)
Paris O'Donnell obtained her BA and PhD in medieval and Renaissance literature at Trinity College, Dublin and studied Library and Information Studies at University College London. Before coming to the Harold Acton Library in February, she worked in libraries in London and Oxford.
Lucia Cappelli - Deputy Librarian
Lucia Cappelli graduated in Librarianship and Bibliographical Studies and obtained an MA in Contemporary Archive Science at The University of Florence. She has been working at the British Institute since 1998 and in the Library since 2001. With her passion for books and the history of publishing, she has also worked for the Gabinetto G.P. Vieusseux and the Culture Department of the Commune of Florence. She is currently teaching “Library Organization for Education” at Florence University.
Mark Roberts - Cultural Programme co-ordinator
Mark Roberts, MBE MA, read English at Magdalen College, Oxford. He has held a number of different roles at the British Institute since 1977 and is now responsible for the cultural programme of evening lectures.
Alyson Price - Archivist
Alyson Price is an historian and has worked as a teacher, university administrator and archivist. She has a particular interest in nineteenth and early twentieth century Italy and in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century India. She has produced a new edition of Julia Maitland's Letters from Madras, first published in 1843. Since 2001 she has been responsible for identifying, processing and cataloging the holdings in the Archive of the British Institute of Florence. In 2011 she published Florence in the Nineteenth Century: A Guide to Original Sources in Florentine Archives and Libraries for Researchers into the English-Speaking Community.
Sofia Novello - Library Assistant and Coordinator of the Shakespeare Graduate Conference
Sofia Novello, MA, started as Library Assistant at the Harold Acton Library in February 2005. A graduate of Foreign Languages, English and French, at the University of Florence, she completed an MA in Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute of Stratford-upon-Avon, University of Birmingham, in 2001.