Faculty
Lecturer
Barbara Alfano
Ph.D., Comaprative Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, 2004. Laurea summa cum laude in Foreign Languages and Literatures, Istituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli, Italy, 1995.
Dr. Alfano is a native of Italy that she left for the U.S.A. in 1999. She specializes in contemporary Italian fiction, with a focus on representations of America, issues of identity, and themes related to travel. She privileges a narratological approach to textual analysis and her critical work stands at the intersection of ethics and literature.
In 2004, her dissertation, Subjecting the Nation: The United States of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film, won the Penn State Alumni Association Dissertation Award. From this work stems the essay “Et in Arcadaia Ego: Gina Lagorio’s L’arcadia americana as the Reflection of a European Literary Self” that appeared on Forum Italicum in Fall 2006. She has also published “Il narratore delle Novelle del Bandello e la funzione mediatrice della scrittura” (Italica, Spring 2004), and “Fugitive Diegesis of the First Person Singular in Borges and Calvino” (Variaciones Borges, 2001). She is currently working on her first book based on her doctoral dissertation and has submitted for publication an essay on Francesca Duranti’s Left-Handed Dreams.
Teaching Italian language is a major component of Dr. Alfano’s academic life. She directed the Italian Language Program at Penn State in 2005-2006, and has co-authored the instructor’s manual of the Italian textbook Percorsi. Besides reading stories, Dr. Alfano likes to write them. She has published a couple of tales on Storie and on L’anello che non tiene, and a third one is forthcoming.
