Kathleen LaPenta

Ph.D.

Senior Lecturer of Italian

Co-director, Bronx Italian American History Initiative

Faber Hall 554
718-817-2695
klapentalong[email protected]

SPRING 2023 Office hours:

Rose Hill: W 10-11 in 554 Faber

Lincoln Center: M 1-2 in 924B Lowenstein

& by appointment (email [email protected]).

Education

BA, University of Notre Dame
PhD, Rutgers University

Biography

Kathleen LaPenta teaches Italian language, literature and film at Fordham University. She is co-director of the Bronx Italian American History Initiative, an oral history project about Italians and Italian American residents of the Bronx. She completed her Ph.D. in Italian Studies at Rutgers University, where she was a recipient of the University Bevier Fellowship and the Fulbright Scholarship. Her research focuses on Italian culture since the unification and includes work on literature, film and oral history. Her publications have been featured in The Italianist¸The Italian American Review and Moderna: Semestrale di teoria e critica della letteratura. She is currently at work on a book about global Italian identities in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Courses Taught

Intensive Elementary Italian
Intermediate Italian I and II
Advanced Composition and Stylistics
Italy and the Arts
Remembering the Long Century: Italian History in Literature, Film and Music

Selected Publications

“Resistance in the Margins: Transnational Readings of Italian Australian, Canadian and American Narratives.” Moderna: Semestrale di teoria e critica della letteratura. (forthcoming September 2020).

“Performative Ethnicity, Embodied Memory and Oral History in Narratives from The Bronx Italian American History Initiative.” Italian American Review, 10.1 (Winter 2020): 1-18. (co-authored with Jacqueline Reich).

“Storia orale come metodologia: proposte, problematiche e prognosi.” Arabeschi (Smarginature), no. 10 (2017). http://www.arabeschi.it/41-storia-orale-come-metodologia-proposte-problematiche-e-prognosi-/. (co-authored with Jacqueline Reich).

“Framing Francis: Prayer poems as source-text in Francesco Giullare di Dio,” The Italianist 36.2 (2016): 177-186.

“Bronte e la Libertà: fonti letterarie del film storico.” In Cinema e Risorgimento: Visioni e Revisioni, ed. Fulvio Orsitto. Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2012: 171-186.