Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies; Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies:
Departments of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies
Phone: +1 401 863 3380
Suzanne_Stewart-Steinberg@brown.edu
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg works on Italian and German literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, on psychoananlysis and literary and cultural theory, with particular interests in the construction of gender.
Biography
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg works on the literature, culture and politics of 19th and 20th century Italian and German literature. She received her B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Essex, Great Britain in sociology, her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University, and an M.A. in German Studies from Cornell University. She began teaching at Cornell University and came to Brown in 2005. Her book Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-de-Siecle was published by Cornell University Press in 1998. She has a forthcoming book on the construction of modern Italian identity in the post-Unification period entitled The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians (1860-1930).
Interests
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg received her B.A. (Hons.) in Sociology from the University of Essex (United Kingdom) in 1975 with a special focus on comparative political economy and on Antonio Gramsci's theories of ideology and the state. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in the Department of Political Science in 1990. Her doctoral thesis on the problem of ideology in the works of Rousseau, Levi-Strauss, Marx and Freud sought to establish a methodological bridge between the social sciences and literary studies through an interrogation of the relationship between political and literary consent. She earned an M.A. in German Studies from Cornell University with a thesis on the question of consent through the psychoanalytic and cultural-historical lens of masochism. Professor Stewart-Steinberg taught at Cornell University from 1986 until she came to Brown University in 2005 to join both the Department of Italian Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature.
Professor Stewart-Steinberg's publications include Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-de-Siècle (Cornell University Press, 1998); and a series of articles on the construction of masculinity in the fin-de-siècle cultures of Italy and the German-speaking world, in the works of such authors as Wagner, Freud, Matilde Serao, Scipio Sighele and Maria Montessori. She has just completed a manuscript submitted to the University of Chicago Press entitled The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians (1860-1920). The book interrogates the history of "making Italians" between Italy's national Unification and the rise of fascism, through a reading of Collodi's Pinocchio, of the works of the inventor of mass psychology Scipio Sighele, the fictional works of Matilde Serao and Edmondo De Amicis, the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, the debates surrounding the construction of the Italian welfare mother, and the pedagogical works of Maria Montessori.
Professor Stewart-Steinberg's current research projects include a planned exhibit in the United States of a selection of works from the Criminal Anthropological Museum of Cesare Lombroso in Turin, for which she will be the principal curator. She has also begun work on the so-called memory wars in contemporary Italy, memory wars that have reopened the problem of Italy's fascist past, the ensuing civil war and the birth of the Republic in and as the experience of the Resistance. This book is now tentatively entitled The Royal Road to Forgetfulness: Italy, Psychoanalysis and the War Against Memory.
Awards
1978-1982: Yale University Fellowship
1989: Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching, Cornell University
1992: Coolidge Colloquium Fellowship, Association for Religion and Intellectual Life
1994-1995: Post-Doctoral Mellon Fellow, Government Department, Cornell University
1997: School of Criticism and Theory Fellowship, Cornell University
1997-1998: Society for the Humanities Fellow, Cornell University
1999: DAAD Fellowship for Faculty Summer Seminar with Prof. Biddy Martin: Gender and Sexuality in German Studies, Cornell University
2006: Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literature, Modern Language Association
Affiliations
Modern Language Association
American Association of Teachers of Italian
American Association of Italian Studies
Funded Research
1993: European Studies Grant for new course development, Cornell University
2004: Cornell University, Humanities Council Grant for research in Italy
2006: Brown University, Department of Italian Studies: Humanities Research Fund for research in Italy ($1,500.00)
Curriculum Vitae
Download Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format
