Graduate Student Profile

Amanda Minervini

Amanda Minervini has a honors Laurea in Literature from the Università di Bari, Italy (2002) where she wrote a thesis entitled “Bernard-Marie Koltès «Ceci n’est pas la vrai vie» – Elementi di una drammaturgia”. As a college student in Italy, she was a volunteer member of a jury to adjudicate short stories competitions and short videos and theatre productions, often collaborating with writer and director Francesco Carofiglio. The works of Stanford comparatist Franco Moretti convinced her to make a definitive career choice.

A Fulbright Fellowship won in 2004 allowed her to start her coursework in the USA. In 2006 she started her Ph.D. in Italian Studies at Brown University and a few months later she completed a two-year MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. At UMass-Amherst, she specialized in Italian, Anglo-American and French literature with a special interest in contemporary literature and cinema, and in contemporary literary theory. While working towards her MA, she has also held positions as teaching assistant for various topics, such as “Myth, Folktale and Children’s Literature” or “Spiritual Autobiography”. Her research so far has encompassed Derek Jarman, Antonio Tabucchi, and John Barth, as well as Italian Gastronomy, Dante, Mozart, Shakespeare, Petrarch and the French Petrarchist poets of the XVI century.

She is currently engaged in teaching Italian language and culture classes (which sometimes involve the philological making of gnocchi) and in preparing the grounds for her future research. Starting with an evaluation of the political impact of the aftermath of the Resistenza, the core of her dissertation will develop an argument about the representation of the male hero in Italian narrative texts of the 50s, especially through war novels and movies, in comparison with some European and American coeval examples.