Clarissa Clò

I am very happy to have joined SDSU and the Department of European Studies in the fall of 2005 as Assistant Professor and Director of the Italian Language Program. I teach upper-division courses in Italian literature, cinema, cultural studies and composition. I am also an Associate Graduate Faculty with the Department of Women’s Studies and I am developing a working relationship with LARC (Language Acquisition Research Center) to incorporate advanced media technology in the Italian classroom.

Prior to coming to San Diego I spent two years as Lecturer in Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2003-2005) where I taught language, culture and film courses. At UNC-CH I was also affiliated with the Center for European Studies and co-organized the annual American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS) conference in 2005 with my colleagues in Italian.

I received my Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California San Diego in 2003 with a dissertation entitled “Italy in the World and the World in Italy: Tracing Alternative Cultural Trajectories” which explored the regional and transnational dimensions of Italian culture in Italy and abroad throughout the 20th century. Some of the cultural productions I analyzed included novels and oral narratives such as Sibilla Aleramo’s Una donna and Marie Hall Ets’s Rosa: The Life of an Immigrant Woman, theatrical representations of the Federal Theatre Project and the Italian anarchist and immigrant theatre, films by Gillo Pontecorvo, Giuliano Montaldo, Davide Ferrario, and Guido Chiesa, and music by alternative bands like CCCP/CSI, and Modena City Ramblers.

My current research projects in Italian and Cultural Studies focus on Italian regional and global cultures, on postcolonial writing in Italian, on Italian contemporary folk music, on documentary filmmaking and censorship, on the interrelation between art and genre cinemas in Italy and on the Mediterranean dis/connections of Italian culture. My academic interests include migration, diaspora, feminist and postcolonial studies, and popular culture. I have published articles, interviews, reviews and translations in journals such as Forum Italicum, Annali d’Italianistica, Italica, Diacritics, Diaspora: a Journal of Transnational Studies, Africa e Mediterraneo and IBC: Informazioni, Inchieste, Commenti sui Beni Culturali. I have also edited a special issue of the Italian academic journal Il Lettore di Provincia (Longo editore) on regional cultural studies in Emilia-Romagna, which includes essays on literature, film, music, photography, theatre, culture and politics.

I am originally from a village near Modena in Italy. I attended the Università degli Studi of Bologna, where I studied foreign languages and postcolonial literatures in English and wrote a thesis on Olive Senior, a Jamaica author, and other Caribbean women writers. Before coming to the US in 1995 as an exchange student at the University of Denver, I studied in the UK as an Erasmus exchange student at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. I also hold an MA in Women’s Studies from the University of Cincinnati, where I studied feminist theory and criticism and wrote my final paper on the experience of immigrant women in Emilia-Romagna, Italy.

I am looking forward to getting to know more students and colleagues at SDSU and establish collaborations with them and with other communities in San Diego.