Simone Castaldi is a Professor of Italian at Hofstra University in New York where he teaches cinema, literature, and comics studies. He is the author of the first in-depth English language study of Italian comics, Drawn and Dangerous (University Press of Mississippi), a book analyzing the intersection of the postmodern arts with Italian auteur comics during the 1980s. He has also published articles and contributed chapters to books on Italian cinema, literature, and comics. In 2020, in collaboration with Dean Mullaney, he completed the translation of Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese, a twelve-volume series for The Library of American Comics (IDW).