The Persistent Puppet: Pinocchio's Heirs in Contemporary Fiction and Film  Rebecca West Rebecca West Rebecca West is professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and professor in the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is also the director of the Center for Gender Studies. West is the author of Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge (Harvard University Press, 1981), Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling (University of Toronto Press, 2000) and is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2001).