Faculty
Associate Professor
Maria Truglio
Maria Truglio, Associate Professor of Italian, earned her BA from Wesleyan University in 1992 and her PhD from Yale in 2001.
Dr. Truglio’s research interests include 19th- and 20th- century Italian literature, children’s literature, and critical methodologies, especially psychoanalysis, semiotics, and post-structuralism. In her book, Beyond the Family Romance: The Legend of Pascoli (University of Toronto Press, 2007), Truglio offers a psychoanalytic perspective of the work of Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912), one of Italy’s most celebrated and innovative poets, with a particular focus on the uncanny. In her study, she examines how Pascoli and Freud interrogate the question of “origins,” manifested in such images as the maternal, the Golden Age, and childhood.
In addition to her work on Pascoli and on Italian gothic writers, Dr. Truglio has published articles on Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo, and on the children’s books of Annie Vivanti, Umberto Eco and Eugenio Carmi, and Eugenio Cherubini. This research has been published in journals such as Forum Italicum, Quaderni d’italianistica, Romanic Review, MLN: Modern Language Notes, and Children’s Literature. She has contributed an essay to the MLA’s volume on Teaching Pinocchio. Her current book project explores children’s literature in Italy from the unification period though the rise fascism (1860-1922), and has received funding from the Children’s Literature Association and from Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
Dr. Truglio teaches a range of courses that include topics such as Romanticism in Italy, Women Writers, Italian-American culture, Italian theater, advanced language development, and turn-of-the-century literature. Her interdisciplinary teaching initiatives have been supported by from the IAH. She received a “bridging the classroom” grant for a collaboration between her undergraduate seminar on children’s literature and an advanced sculpture class. Students translated several 19th-century Sicilian fairy tales and created original artwork that interpreted those stories. The semester culminated in a public exhibit of the texts and sculptures at the Down Town Theater. A “team-teaching” grant funded her co-taught graduate seminar with Dr. Fernández-Medina on Literature in Spain and Italy. This course included four salons open to the public as part of the IAH’s “Moments of Change” program which explored the period 1889-1914. Dr. Truglio received an Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Liberal Arts in 2010.
