This fall, Professor Catherine Ramsey-Portolano will deliver a (virtual) guest lecture at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, as part of the undergraduate course Don't Call Me Crazy! A Journey Into Women's Mental Health in Fiction and Film offered by the university’s Department of Spanish & Italian. Professor Ramsey-Portolano was invited to speak on the topic because her book Performing Bodies: Female Illness in Italian Literature and Cinema (1860-1920), published in 2017, offers insightful discussion of key materials that will be studied in the course.
This November will see the publication of her next book, Nineteenth-Century Italian Women Writers and the Woman Question, by Routledge. Ramsey-Portolano’s latest work “focuses on the literary, journalistic and epistolary production of Italian woman writer Neera, pseudonym for Anna Radius Zuccari, one of the most prolific and successful women writers of late nineteenth-century Italy”.
The publication of this new work follows that of two peer-reviewed articles, both in the past academic year. These articles are:
- “The diva and the seduction of female sickness in early Italian cinema” in Cinerotic: Eroticism in Films and Video Games, eds. Angela Fabris and Jörg Helbig. Trier: WVT, 2020, 35-45.
and
- “The ‘Rapable’ Woman: From Capuana’s Giacinta to Maraini’s Marianna Ucrìa.” Italian Studies in Southern Africa 32, 2 (2019): 197-220.
As well as publishing articles in these peer-reviewed journals, Professor Ramsey-Portolano has also served as peer reviewer for Edizioni Ca’ Foscari and California Italian Studies Journal.
Finally, we were delighted to hear Professor Ramsey-Portolano was invited to become a member of the International Editorial Board of the journal Italian Studies in South Africa (ISSA).
Many congratulations to Professor Ramsey-Portolano for these numerous far-ranging successes!