Congratulations to Borbala Gaspar, Ph.D. student in SLAT and GAT in Italian Studies, who received a Student/Faculty Interaction (SFI) Grant from Student Affairs and Enrollment Management, Academic Initiatives and Student Success (SAEM/AISS).  The grant will allow her to purchase tablets for a digital literacies project she will complete with her students in Italian 202.   

Congratulations to Dr. Fabian Alfie, who just published “La donna taverna: La ballata delle due cognate ubriache” as part of a collection of essays for a conference held in June 2015, "La poesia italiana prima di Dante" (Italian Poetry before Dante).

Congratulations to Dr. Aileen A. Feng who has officially published her monograph with the University of Toronto Press!

Writing Beloveds: Humanist Petrarchism and the Politics of Gender 

"Covering a period from the late-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth century, Aileen A. Feng’s engagingly written work identifies and analyzes a Latin humanist precursor to the poetic movement known as Renaissance Petrarchism. Though Petrachism is usually read solely as a vernacular poetic tradition, in Writing Beloveds, Feng recovers the initial political purposes in Latin prose and traces how poetry set the terms for gender, agency, and power in early modern Italy.

By revealing the literary motifs in men’s and women’s writing about gender she maps how certain figures in Petrarch’s writing transmitted gendered ideas of power and reflected a growing anxiety about women as public figures. This work includes nuanced analyses of poetry, linguistic treatises, debates on imitation, representations of gender and epistolary correspondence in Latin and Italian. Writing Beloveds is a landmark study that highlights the new social reality of women writers in early modern Europe."

http://www.utppublishing.com/Writing-Beloveds-Humanist-Petrarchism-and-the-Politics-of-Gender.html

Dr. Fabian Alfie, professor of Italian, was featured in a story by UA News in how the work of the famed poet Dante Alighieri has remained a focal point of popular interest for centuries.

Read the full story here:  Four Questions: 'Inferno' Unveils Obsession With Evil's Origins

Professor Beppe Cavatorta was selected to deliver the keynote address at Montclair State University’s Symposium EduMusica: Songs and Music in the Italian Curriculum.

Professor Beppe Cavatorta was interviewed in an Italian newspaper about his latest book.  The article "I versi di Ballerini? Ricerca sulla lingua" can be seen in its full version below:

Please help us congratulate Dr. Aileen Feng who was just promoted to Associate Professor of Italian with tenure!

We are very happy to welcome Dr. M. Letizia Bellocchio to the Department of French and Italian!  Dr. Bellocchio is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Wesleyan University. She received a Ph.D in Italian Studies at Rutgers University and a Ph.D in Comparative Studies (Literature, Theatre, Cinema) at the Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. Her research interests are 19th-20th century Italian Literature and Theatre, Film Studies, Adaptations and the contamination of different media (Literature, Cinema, Theatre), Italian culture and Law. She is the editor of one book and several articles and book chapters in her areas of interests.