I am a Doctoral Lecturer in the Italian Program at Hunter College, CUNY. I hold a Dottorato di Ricerca from Sapienza University of Rome and a Ph.D. from the Comparative Literature Program (Italian Specialization) at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where I defended a dissertation entitled Narrating Intensity: History and Emotions is Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante. After teaching in Italy and in Germany, I have taught Italian Language, Culture and Literature at all levels, from beginner to advanced, in several colleges in the city of New York, including Queens College, Hunter College, City College (CUNY), NYU and the Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY). I also spent one year as a Visiting Professor at Miami University in Ohio (2022-23), before coming back to CUNY as a full timer.

Interdisciplinary in nature, my research focuses on women writers and on the intersection between literature, history and politics. My Italian doctoral dissertation, which I defended in 2008, is a comparative study of 20th-century wartime novels, and includes chapters on Elizabeth Bowen, Christa Wolf and Elsa Morante. Later, I decided to continue working on women’s position in history and on propaganda, expanding my inquiry to the fields of history of emotions and affect theory. My Ph.D. dissertation, Narrating Intensity, which was awarded an Altman Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, analyzes three Italian novels and the narrative strategies they employ to create “moments of intensity.” By this term, I mean disruptions in the narrative that signal the characters’ heightened perception of time and history. My book project, entitled A Theory of Intensity: History, Emotions, and the Female Character in the Contemporary Italian Novel, focuses on the notion of intensity as a rhetorical strategy, investing logos, ethos and pathos. My work exposes the continuities between two historical sagas written in the 1960s and the 1970s (La Storia by Elsa Morante and L’arte della gioia by Goliarda Sapienza), and L’amica geniale by Elena Ferrante, while at the same time considering each novel as a specific configuration of intensity.

In this website, I share my research and teaching experience. Feel free to contact me for further information or feedback.

Stefania Porcelli
[email protected]

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