Maria Truglio

Maria Truglio is a Professor of Italian and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Penn State (University Park). She earned her BA from Wesleyan University in 1992, and her MA (1996) and PhD (2001) from Yale University. Her research investigates Italian literature from the nineteenth century to the present day with attention to questions of gender and national identity formation. She is currently focusing on the field of children’s literature, bringing psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, and postcolonial methodologies to bear on texts written for young people from the unification period forward. Her first book, Beyond the Family Romance: The Legend of Pascoli (U of Toronto P, 2007) examined the works of the canonical Symbolist poet Giovanni Pascoli through a psychoanalytic lens. Her monograph Italian Children’s Literature and National Identity: Childhood, Melancholy, Modernity (Routledge, 2017) analyzed books for young readers in the period between unification and fascism (1861-1922). She is now researching how contemporary Italian children’s literature ascribes meanings to the “Mediterranean migration crisis” in light of Italy’s postcolonial context. With Nicolás Fernández-Medina she co-edited the volume Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy (Routledge, 2016), to which she contributed a chapter on Massimo Bontempelli. Dr. Truglio teaches courses on topics such as Romanticism in Italy, women writers, Italian-American culture, comedy, advanced language development, patronage and cultural sponsorship in Europe, and children’s literature.