Education: Stefania Lucamante earned her Laurea in Art History from the University of Cagliari, Italy, studied in the Graduate Program of Art History at the University of Rome, Italy, and received a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the Catholic University of America in 1995.
Teaching and Administration: Lucamante joined the Italian faculty at Georgetown University, where she worked for seven years, first as a lecturer and then as Assistant Visiting Professor. In 2000 Lucamante accepted a position in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University of America where she coordinates the Italian Studies Program. She has previously taught at the University of Maryland. She has taught both at the undergraduate and graduate level courses ranging from the novel in the twentieth century to the splendor of Rome in film and literature; International women writers’ fiction and autobiography, the Holocaust in comparative studies, Italian American studies and Italian cinema.
Itala Publications: Italian contemporary literature and Italian women writers are Prof. Lucamante’s most important fields of scholarship (more than 30 articles). The University of Toronto Press has recently published her authored volume, A Multitude of Women: The Challenges of the Contemporary Italian Novel (Fall 2008), while Italy and The Bourgeoisie: The Re-thinking of a Class, a collection of essays on bourgeoisie she edited, was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (March 2009). Also in 2009 were published the selected proceedings of the international Conference she organized in Rome in 2007 with Alessandro Portelli Memoria privata e memoria collettiva: il ricordo della Shoah come politica sociale. They are also available on line at www.italianisticaultraiectina.org (eds. Stefania Lucamante, Monica Jansen, Raniero Speelman, and Silvia Gaiga). Prof. Lucamante has also authored Isabella Santacroce (Cadmo, 2002), and Elsa Morante e l'eredità proustiana (Cadmo, 1998). She is the editor of Italian Pulp Fiction: The New Narrative of the Giovani Cannibali Writers for which she wrote an introduction and an essay on consumerism and women’s fiction (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001). Lucamante is also the co-editor with Sharon Wood of volume ‘Under Arturo’s Star’: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante, (Purdue UP Romance Language Series, 2005). Her articles have appeared in Poetica, Italica, Narrativa, Leggendaria, Forum Italicum, Quaderni d’Italianistica, Rivista di Studi Italiani, Italian Culture, and Modern Languages Notes. She recently compiled two entries for the Routledge Literary Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, ed. Gaetana Marrone-Puglia New York: Routledge, 2007, (Giovani Cannibali, I: 373-75) and (Simona Vinci, II: 1993-94). She also published “Road Movies and Gas Stations: Monica Stambrini’s Benzina as Creation of Alternative Spaces,” Quaderni d’Italianistica Vol.XXIV.2 (2008): 111-34; “Proposte per una poetica ‘liquida’ dell’ideologia e dell’estetica contemporanee: Tiziano Scarpa e la parola ‘altrui’ della letteratura,” Poetiche 3 (2007): 491-535,and “The Privilege of Memory Goes to the Women: Melania Mazzucco and the Narrative of the Italian Migration,” Modern Language Notes, Vol. 124, No. 1, January 2009 (Italian Issue), published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The article can be viewed online at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mln/v124/124.1.lucamante.html
Prof. Lucamante has given lectures in England at Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Wales-Bangor, Wake Forest University, CUNY, Yale University, Stanford University, Harvard University, University of California-Davis, University of Connecticut-Storrs, Université de Paris, France, University of Virginia, and University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. She serves as reader for several journals and university presses.
Current interests: Critical and literary theory, non-canonical literature, Shoah studies, Elsa Morante and her epigones, Tiziano Scarpa and the role of the intellectual in contemporary Italy, Italian women writers and literary blogs. Her forthcoming book bears the provisional title: Una difficile identità: da Liana Millu a Helena Janeczek fra ebraismo e memoria della Shoah (A Difficult Identity: Jewishness and Shoah Memory from Liana Millu to Helena Janeczek) Franco Cesati Editore, Florence.
