Mary Jo Bona, noted author and editor of works on Italian American women writers, will present the Esposito Visiting Faculty Fellow lecture March 24, 4 - 6 p.m. in the Foster Administration Building, Room 333.
UMass Dartmouth announced today that Mary Jo Bona, author of Claiming A Tradition: Italian American Women Writers and Professor of English and Women's Studies SUNY Stony Brook, has been named the Esposito Visiting Faculty Fellow for 2011.
Mary Jo Bona, noted author and editor of works on Italian American women writers, will present the Esposito Visiting Faculty Fellow lecture March 24, 4 - 6 p.m. in the Foster Administration Building, Room 333.
Drawing from her monograph, By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America, she will discuss the chapter, "Tame and Wild: Tales of Death in Italian American Literature." The presentation will focus on "widows' lamentations": how women grieve the death of their beloved. The lecture will explore these representations in more recent, modern novels, in which topics of death include difficult conversations about illnesses emerging from AIDS and how women are represented as responding to that form of dying.
Prof. Bona teaches both literature and cultural courses for European Languages, English and Women's Studies. These courses include Italian American and African American Women Writers, Italian Americans and Ethnic Relations, Images of Women in Italian American Culture and Film. She has been the recipient of the Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Award for distinction in Italian American scholarship, the Aniello Lauri Award for Creative Writing, and the Burlington Northern Faculty Achievement Award, Teacher of the Year. Prof. Bona is the editor of The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women's Fiction and is the guest editor of MELUS (Multiethnic Literature In The United States).
The Esposito Visiting Faculty Fellowship was established by former UMass Dartmouth 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."
The lecture is free and open to the public. Faculty are invited to attend and to bring their students. For more information, contact Louisa Medeiros at 508.999.8352.