Faculty
Associate Professor
Sherry Roush
Sherry Roush (Ph.D Yale University, 1999, MA Yale University, 1996, BA University of CA, Santa Cruz, 1992) is Associate Professor of Italian, specializing in Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature and culture. She is the author of Hermes’ Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella (University of Toronto Press, 2002) and co-editor of The Medieval Marriage Scene: Prudence, Passion, Policy (Arizona State University Press, 2005).
Her current research projects include a book provisionally titled Ghosts of Poets Past: Motivations for Authorial Ghost Storytelling in Early Modern Italy, as well as an unabridged English translation of Campanella’s Philosophical Poetry. Her scholarly articles have appeared in the journals Renaissance Quarterly, Italica, MLN: Modern Language Notes, Quaderni d’Italianistica, Viator, and Italian Culture. Particular areas of scholarly interest include Italian poetry, autobiography, confessional literature, hermeneutics, translation theory and practice, and interdisciplinary intersections of Italian literature/music/art/film.
Dr. Roush has received various grants and awards for her research, including prizes from the American Academy in Rome, the Folger Institute, the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, and the Bogliasco Foundation. In addition to receiving the Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of the Liberal Arts in 2004, she was named a Commencement Marshal for the College. Outside the University, she has served on the Modern Language Association’s Executive Committee for the Division of Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature (2001-05), and as a member of the juries to select recipients of NEH Summer Institute grants and Zerilli-Marimò prizewinners in contemporary Italian fiction (both in 2003); at Penn State, she serves on the Faculty Senate and on the Penn State Press Editorial Boards for both the Institute for the Arts and Humanities and Romance Language book series. Over the course of her career Dr. Roush has enjoyed consulting on a vast array of projects ranging from a Dante project in the virtual realm of Second Life to a documentary film on Italian-American lynchings, and from Ernest Hemingway’s Italian correspondences to an initiative to convert Italian texts into Braille.
