Maria Truglio

Maria Truglio is a Professor of Italian and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She earned her B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1992, and her M.A. (1996) and Ph.D. (2001) from Yale University. 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), she 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, and investigates the literature of the Scapigliatura as a precursor to Pascoli’s uncanny poetry.

In addition to her work on Pascoli and on Italian gothic writers, Truglio has published articles on Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo, Melania Mazzucco’s Vita, and on the children’s books of Annie Vivanti, Dino Buzzati, Umberto Eco and Eugenio Carmi, Eugenio Cherubini, Francesco D’Adamo, as well as on the representation of Giuseppe Garibaldi in children’s books before the First World War. This research has been published in journals such as Forum Italicum, Quaderni d’italianistica, Romanic Review, MLN: Modern Language Notes, California Italian Studies, Italian Quarterly, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and Children’s Literature. She has contributed an essay to the MLA’s volume on Teaching Pinocchio. Her book project, Italian Children’s Literature and National Identity: Childhood, Melancholy, Modernity was published by Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture Series in 2017. The book explores children’s literature in Italy from the unification period though the rise fascism. This research has received funding from the Children’s Literature Association and from Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities.  Her current project examines how contemporary books for children in Italy represent migration, and has recevied support from the Children’s Literature Association and Penn State’s Centre for Global Studies.

With Nicolás Fernández-Medina, she co-founded the Spanish and Italian Modernist Studies Forum at Penn State. She and Fernández-Medina co-edited the volume Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy (Routledge, 2016), to which she also contributed a chapter on Massimo Bontempelli’s magical realist children’s book. Currently, Truglio is participating in an oral history project funded by the CHI entitled Centre County’s History Otherwise: Narrating and Mapping Brazilian, Hispanic, and Italian Women’s Stories led by Judith Sierra-Rivera. She also serves on the International Committee of the Children’s Literature Association. She also serves on the International Committee of the Children’s Literature Association, and has been collaborating with colleagues in Chili and Philadelphia on projects concerning children’s literature and national identities, such as this webinar held in 2023.

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. She received a “bridging the classroom” grant from the IAH (now the HI) for a collaboration between her undergraduate seminar on children’s literature and an advanced sculpture class. The semester culminated in a public exhibit of the texts and sculptures at the Down Town Theater. Truglio received an Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of the Liberal Arts in 2010, and the Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Outstanding Teaching Award from the College in 2014. In 2020-2022 she served as faculty coordinator for Penn State’s Redesigning Modernities project which produced a range of syllabi and OER material.
Some of her public facing work can be found here:

• A conversation with Elena Borelli about the poem “Anticlos” from Giovanni Pascoli’s Poemi conviviali: https://www.poemiconviviali.com/
• A discussion of the new Disney+ Pinocchio film as a post to the Children’s Literature Association International Committee blog: https://childlitassn.wixsite.com/intlcommittee/single-post/disneys-zany-pinocchio
• A conversation about the reception of Gianni Rodari in the U.S. on Radio Citta’ Fujiko (Bologna, Italy):  https://www.radiocittafujiko.it/gianni-rodari-nel-mondo-usa-ed-india/
• A review of The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste on WPSU’s “Bookmark”: https://radio.wpsu.org/history-and-culture/2021-02-04/bookmark-the-shadow-king-by-maaza-mengiste

Pronouns

• she / her / hers / (lei)