Please see the pages on Research for more extensive discussions on the department's research interests and activities.
Eugenio Bolongaro
eugenio [dot] bolongaro [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Eugenio Bolongaro) , Associate Professor, LLB (British Columbia), PhD (McGill)
Professor Bolongaro's interests include the contemporary Italian writer Italo Calvino, contemporary fiction (Italian, British, and US), post-World War II Italian cinema, literary theory and cultural studies.
His work includes the book Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature (forthcoming from University of Toronto Press), as well as articles on Boccaccio, John Fowles, and the theory of the fantastic.
Recently Prof. Bolongaro has tackled Italian cinematic neorealism which he discusses from in terms of the Italian directors' self-understanding as progressive intellectuals, as well as from the perspective of gender and the problematic of masculinity. This interest in film has recently led Prof. Bolongaro to carry out a detailed study of Bernardo Bertolucci's early film The Spider Stratagem which is situated within the political and ideological debates of the times, as well as within the current theoretical debates about history and narrative (Hayden White, Carlo Ginzburg, etc.).
Luca Cottini
luca [dot] cottini [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Luca Cottini), Assistant Professor, MA (Notre Dame), PhD (Harvard)
Luca Cottini joined the department in 2012. He has been trained as a classical philologist at the Università degli Studi di Milano, and formed as a modernist scholar and cultural historian at Notre Dame and Harvard.
His interest in the Italian culture of the 19th and 20th centuries moves from a traditional literary focus (on authors like Foscolo, Leopardi, D’Annunzio, Pirandello, Palazzeschi, Marinetti, Calvino, Fenoglio, and Pavese) to a broader interdisciplinary horizon, intersecting literature with visual studies (on Italian early photography, abstract painting, and silent cinema), philosophy (Gentile), and issues of cultural history (modernism and avant-gardes, the reception of industrialism and development of the culture of design). He has published articles and essays on Calvino and Fellini, on Fenoglio, on the silent movie Maciste Alpino, and on the photographic memoirs of WWI.
His current work focuses on the emergence of industrial modernity in Italy at the turn of the 20th century. His method consists in observing this culture from the perspective of its iconic objects of mass consumption (i.e. wristwatches, bicycles, cigarettes, and photographs), as they create new social practices, and as they shape, in ads and in the arts, a new imagery of the modern. Intertwining social and cultural history, his research addresses, in a larger European context, core philosophical issues of the age (time, body, memory, space), and, in the case of Italy, reconstructs the complex negotiation of the nation’s peculiar road to modernity, as an unresolved and ongoing synthesis of tradition and innovation. His future projects include a study on the modernist rediscovery of the Baroque poetics (in the late-19th century’s re-appreciation of the commedia dell’arte and of the still life), as well as an analysis of the literary construction of Italy’s war in Libya.
Lucienne Kroha
lucienne [dot] kroha [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Lucienne Kroha) , Associate Professor, MA (McGill), PhD (Harvard)
Professor Kroha holds an MA from McGill and a PhD from Harvard University and joined the Department as a full-time member in 1990. She is a modernist with a particular interest in narrative prose, in women's writing, in gender studies, in psychoanalysis and in Pirandello. Her book, The Woman Writer in Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy, is considered a seminal work in the area of Italian feminist literary criticism and continues to be widely read and cited in this now-burgeoning field. It is also frequently used in courses on Italian women's writing.
Professor Kroha's articles have appeared in prestigious journals in Italy (Rivista di studi pirandelliani, Otto-Novecento, Esperienze letterarie), Great Britain (The Italianist, Journal of the Society for Pirandello Studies), France (Chroniques italiennes), the United States (Italica) and Canada (Yearbook of Italian Studies, Quaderni d'Italianistica). She is frequently invited to contribute essays to collective works, most recently to the Cambridge University Press volume History of Women's Writing in Italy (2000).
She has participated, by invitation, in international conferences at Dartmouth, Princeton, the Sorbonne, University of Rome, University of London, University of Toronto, State University of New York (Stony Brook). In January 2001, she presented the results of her work on Bassani and Thomas Mann to a group of German scholars in a lecture at the Centre for the Humanities at the University of Toronto.
Matteo Soranzo
matteo [dot] soranzo [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Matteo Soranzo) , Assistant Professor, Dott. Lett. (Padua), PhD (Wisconsin)
Matteo Soranzo is an Italianist with a strong interest in intellectual history, whose area of expertise is fifteenth century literature and culture.
His current work focuses on Italian and neo Latin poetry, rhetoric and astrology at the court of Naples in the Quattrocento, and especially on the poets Giovanni Pontano and Jacopo Sannazaro. He is also interested in the reception of Plato in the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino, Gilles of Viterbo and the diffusion of platonic ideas in the context of Naples. In his research he interprets texts in their intellectual and institutional contexts through traditional techniques of textual criticism combined with analytical concepts borrowed from sociology.
He holds a Laurea in Italian literature and philology from the University of Padua, and a PhD in Italian at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) with a minor in History and European Studies. During his doctoral studies he also attended seminars in early modern paleography at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
His works in progress are a book that investigates the concepts of conjecture and inspiration in Quattrocento Naples, a critical edition of Giovanni Pontano's treatise De Fortuna and an essay on humanistic dialogues. Future projects include a collaborative study on the reception of Marsilio Ficino in Renaissance literature and art.
Faculty Lecturer
Enrica Quaroni
enrica [dot] quaroni [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Enrica Quaroni) , Faculty Lecturer, BA, PhD (McGill)
The first PhD graduate from the McGill Department of Italian (1974), Dr Quaroni has served the Faculty of Arts and the Department in various and demanding capacities. She was, for example, Chair of the Interdepartmental Program in Modern Languages (1978-1982), Assistant to the Chair of the Department (1985-1987), Chair of the Faculty of Arts Curriculum Committee (1991-1995), member of the New and Revised Courses and Programs (NRCP) Committee (1991-1994), and is now Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts (1997-). Since 1992 she has promoted and directed a very successful Summer School for McGill students in Florence, Italy.
Anna Maria Tumino
anna [dot] tumino [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Anna Maria Tumino) , Language Program Coordinator
Retired faculty
Maria Predelli
retired as of September 1, 2007
maria [dot] predelli [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Maria Predelli) , Emeritus Honorific Professor , Dott.Lett. (Florence)
Professor Predelli is a medievalist trained at the school of Italian philologist Gianfranco Contini and the Accademia della Crusca (the Italian institution founded in 1580 and devoted to the study of the Italian language). Her major research interests include Italian chivalresque literature of the 14th and 15th centuries, French chivalresque literature of the 12th century, popular literature and narratology. She has published four books, two of them with Olschki (Florence), one with the Accademia Lucchese di Scienze Lettere e Arti and one with Euroma, the University of Roma-Tor Vergata University Press. Numerous other publications of hers have appeared in collective volumes as well as in Canadian, American and Italian scholarly journals. Please refer to her recent CV for a complete list of publications. She has participated in national and international scholarly conferences in Canada, the Unites States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands and Italy. She was Visiting Scholar at the University of Roma "La Sapienza" in 1986, at Queen's University in 1990 and at the University of Roma-Tor Vergata in 1996. She is a member of the editorial boards of Letteratura Italiana Antica, Testo e Senso (Italy), Italian-Canadiana and Quaderni d'italianistica (Canada).
Pamela D. Stewart
Pamela D. Stewart, Professor Emeritus, BA (Montreal), MA (McGill), FRSC
Jen Wienstein
Retired as of June 1, 2011
jen [dot] wienstein [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Jen Wienstein) , Faculty Lecturer, MA, PhD (McGill)
Dr Jen Wienstein studied at the universities of Milan (Cattolica) and Bologna before obtaining her PhD from McGill in 1984. Since 1986 she has been the language course coordinator of the Department. She has provided English translations of contemporary Italian playwrights, has participated in national and international conferences and has published several articles on twentieth-century author Natalia Ginzburg.