Clarissa Clò

Salve! I joined the Department of European Studies at SDSU in 2005. I teach primarily upper-division courses in Italian literature, cinema, and cultural studies and direct the Italian language program. I am also an Associate Graduate Faculty with the Department of Women's Studies and I have an ongoing working relationship with LARC (Language Acquisition Research Center) to incorporate advanced media technology in the Italian classroom.

My research interests include feminist, queer and postcolonial studies, migration and diaspora, film, and popular culture. My current projects in Italian and Cultural Studies focus on regional and global cultures, on postcolonial writing in Italian, on Italian contemporary folk music, on Italian cinema and documentary filmmaking, on Italian American culture and Mediterranean studies.

I have published articles, interviews, reviews and translations in journals such as Italian Culture, Forum Italicum, Annali d'Italianistica, Italica, Diacritics, Diaspora: a Journal of Transnational Studies, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Africa e Mediterraneo and IBC: Informazioni, Inchieste, Commenti sui Beni Culturali. One of my essays appears in an anthology entitled Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture.

I have also edited a special issue of the Italian 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 currently co-editing a special issue of the journal Studies in Documentary Film on contemporary Italian documentary filmmaking.

In addition to my academic work at SDSU, I collaborate with several Italian American organizations in the community and I am on the Board of Directors of the San Diego Italian Film Festival.

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). 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.

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 Jamaican author, and other Caribbean women writers. Before coming to the US in 1995 as an exchange student at the University of Denver, I was an Erasmus exchange student at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. 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.

At SDSU, I am particularly involved in student life. I am the Faculty Adviser of the Circolo Italiano and of the local chapter of GKA, the Italian National Honor Society. I am also Faculty-in-Residence in the Olmeca/Maya Residence Halls on campus, where I coordinate education programs for several living and learning communities.