Dr. Evelyn Ferraro is an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at SCU. Her teaching and research interests focus on 20th and 21st Italian literature, cinema, and culture, and Italy’s global connections, as resulting from migrations (old and new, from and to Italy), colonization, cultural crossings and syncretism. She holds a Laurea in Foreign Languages and Literatures/English (University of Palermo, Italy), M.A.s in Translation and Comparative Literature (University of Essex, U.K.) and Italian Language and Literature (University of Pittsburgh), and a Ph.D. in Italian Studies (Brown University).

Dr. Ferraro’s scholarly work addresses questions of human mobility, identity crises, exclusion, and practices of resistance in narratives that belong to and expand the framework of Italian Studies, along with challenging essentialist notions of italianità/italianness and national belonging. Her work on the American experience of Italian Jewish writer Ebe Cagli Seidenberg has appeared in Carte Italiane and NeMLA Italian Studies, and she is currently investigating issues of refugee women and coalition politics in Cagli’s testimonial writing. Recently, she co-authored with Dr. Laura Dolp of Montclair State University an article and a book chapter on the porous borders between storytelling and music in the work of Ethiopian-Italian writer and performer Gabriella Ghermandi (respectively published in altrelettere and Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis, Oxford UP, 2016).

She is also a Book Review Editor for Altreitalie, an International Journal of Studies on Italian Migrations in the World. In addition to her research, Evelyn Ferraro has a strong personal commitment to teaching, student learning, and the promotion of diversity within the Italian Studies curriculum. She has taught all levels of Italian, from communicatively-oriented elementary Italian courses and first-year core requirement courses (e.g., “Italy, Gateway of Cultures”) to advanced language and upper-division interdisciplinary courses on the Italian American experience, immigration in Italian cinema, and ecocriticism. Her courses encourage students to connect historical and contemporary subjects of interest and become well-informed, compassionate, and engaged global citizens. Outside the classroom, she has spearheaded the Italian and Italian American Speaker Series at SCU, which is often integrated in her courses and offers opportunities for students and the larger community to participate in Italian cultural events on campus.

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

• Italian and Italian American literature and culture (post-1861)

• Migrations (from and to Italy), Italian national identity, transnational literature and cinema

• Postcolonial theory, gender studies, and theories of space and liminality

• Sicily: Cultural history, representations of Otherness

• Digital Humanities in research and teaching