Esposito Visitng Faculty Fellowship

John and Mary Esposito Visiting Faculty Fellowship

Clorinda Donato, The George L. Graziadio Chair of Italian Studies and Professor of French and Italian at California State University, Long Beach, is the 2013 Esposito Visiting Faculty Fellow. She will present "QUeen of Her Own Big Time: Adriana Trigiani Reimagines Italian American Women's Fiction" on Thursday, March 28, at 4PM in the Board of Trustees room.  In this lecture, she explores how prize-winning novelist, playwright, and screen-writer Adriana Trigiani makes the immigrant experience come alive in a new way through the portrayal of joyful, life-affirming Italian American girls and women. This lecture offers an overview of her iconic characters and illustrates how, through them, she has brought Italian American literature into the mainstream. Like Nella, the heroine of her 2004 novel, Queen of the Big Time, Trigiani lives and writes on her own terms, indeed, “the queen of her own big time!”

Prof. Donato’s research addresses eighteenth-century cultural studies in the areas of knowledge transfer through translation and genre adaptation in encyclopedic compilations and the prose narrative in the global eighteenth century. Her publications include: Discourses of Tolerance and Intolerance in the Eighteenth Century (edited with Hans Erich Bodeker and Peter Reill), “The Travels and Translations of Marc-Antoine Eidous, Encyclopedic Mediator of Enlightenment Texts,” in Translating Travel Writing in Europe, 1750-1850, and “Against Coppet’s Italie:  Ugo Foscolo’s Engaged Italian Romanticism,” in Germaine de Staël:  Forging a Politics of Mediation. She is recipient of the 2012 Education Award, Humanitarian and Leadership Awards, Sons of Italy Western Foundation, the 2012-13 Cal State University Long Beach Research, Scholarly and Creative Activity Award, and a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for “French and Italian for Spanish Speakers."

The Esposito Visiting Faculty Fellowship was established by former Provost Louis Esposito to “...support visiting faculty members who will make presentations and lead discussions in undergraduate courses that include either the study of the Italian-American experience or Italian history and culture. In addition, the visiting faculty fellow will present a public lecture on the social, cultural, psychological, historical or esthetic dimensions of the Italian American experience or on Italian-American achievements in the arts, literature, science, and industry.”

Faculty are invited to attend the lecture and to bring their students. Faculty are also invited to meet informally with Professor Donato. For more information, contact Louisa Medeiros at (508) 999-8352.