About the Bloggers Fall 2007

Felice Italo Beneduce is a PhD candidate in Italian Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut, with a specialization in literature of the fantastic in contemporary Italian culture. He holds a diploma universitario in Translation and a laurea in Translation Studies from the University of Trieste and a Master of Arts in Italian from the University of Connecticut. He has taught Italian language, literature and cinema extensively and at a variety of levels at Brown University, Rhode Island College, the University of Rhode Island and Roger Williams University. Among his other areas of specialization are Italian–American literature, immigrant literature in Italy, the works of Giovanni Guareschi, Cultural and Translation Studies, and Sequential Art. His publications include articles on Italo Calvino, Vittorio De Sica, Luigi Pirandello and a book on the British author JRR Tolkien, published with Bompiani.

Nathalie Ettzevoglou is a PhD candidate in French Literature. She is specializing in medieval literature in particular the relationship between magic and medicine in narrative texts from the XI-XV centuries. She just started a blog with her French 270W course.

Rosetta Giuliani: My interests and experience in the field of Italian Studies are mainly focused on the twentieth-century Italian literature and cinema of colonialism in Africa, and African diaspora in Italy. My dissertation analyzes the portrayal of African-Italian mulattoes and Levantines (the white Italian immigrants who lived in Alexandria, Egypt) in Italian literature and cinema of the Fascist period. I began to take interest in the interplay between African history and the Mediterranean while studying at the University of Bologna, where I completed my undergraduate thesis on Miguel De Cervantes’s imprisonment novels (novelas de cautiverio) and dramas based on the author’s personal experience as prisoner of the Turkish pirates in the African headquarters of Algiers. My graduate training in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Connecticut deepened this interest by introducing me to Italian cinema and literature of African diaspora. My preparation in the field of diaspora and exile studies, and the interplay between subalternation and hegemony, has been broadened by my coursework in Latin American cinema and theatre, Third World cinema and Postcolonial theory.

Barbara Lindsey has directed the Multimedia Language Center at the University of Connecticut since 1996 and given presentations and workshops on Internet-based language instruction at the state and national level. She has twelve years experience teaching German language and literature at the university level, and for the private business sector as well as after school enrichment programs. She has served as project director on three federally funded grants and is a past president of the Connecticut Council of Language Teachers (2004-2006).

Martina G. Lüke studied History, German, and Education at the University of Hamburg and graduated in 2000 with the Erstes Staatsexamen (MA equivalent). In 2002 she graduated with the Zweites Staatsexamen (MA equivalent) at the Hamburg Board of Education and became a high-school teacher. In 2006 she completed her Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Hamburg. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut. She published a book based on her Hamburg dissertation research on German literature education in Imperial Germany in the series Geschichte des Deutschunterrichts/History of German Language Education (“Zwischen Tradition und Aufbruch. Deutschunterricht im Deutschen Kaiserreich”, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007). Her other research interest lies in Romanticism and Modernism.

Fulvio Orsitto graduated in Lettere Moderne (1998) and D.A.M.S. (2001) at the Università degli Studi di Torino. He received a Master of Arts in Italian at the University of Connecticut (2003) and a Master (Laurea specialistica) in Gestione e Promozione del Patrimonio Artistico, Multimediale e Cinematografico (2004) at the Università degli Studi di Torino. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Connecticut, where he teaches Italian Cinema but also Italian language and Literature. His primary areas of expertise are Italian Cinema (with a particular emphasis on Neorealism and the 90’s) and American film genres. His publications include articles on Blasetti, De Sica, Pasolini, Florestano Vancini and the Taviani brothers.

Alfonso Varona is a PhD candidate in Spanish Literature. He is currently working on his dissertation titled “From Melodrama to Postmodernism in Three Generation of Mexican Women Playwrights”. Other interest areas include Mexican prose narrative and Latin American literature in general. For this academic year, Alfonso was awarded a Predoctoral Fellowship from the Modern and Classical Languages Department, and the Whetten Graduate Fellowship from the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS).

Renato Ventura

Renato Ventura is a PhD candidate in Italian Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has taught Italian language, literature and cinema.

Manuela Wagner holds an M.A in English studies and Marketing and a Ph.D. in English studies with a specialization in linguistics from Graz University, Austria. During her graduate studies she spent 2 years in the baby lab of Psychophysics in the department of Neurophysiology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and 3 years in the Department of Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research interests include pragmatic development in first and second language acquisition, world language teaching methodology, intercultural communication, communicative development in special circumstances, and humor in the world language classroom. As director of the Critical Languages Program and the Linkage Through Language Program Manuela also engages in research in less commonly taught languages and languages across the curriculum. She teaches courses in world language teaching theory and pedagogy, pragmatics, introduction to linguistics, as well as German language and culture.