ldsarnelli@frit.ucsb.edu
Phelps 5332
Laura D. Sarnelli holds a Ph.D. in Literatures and Cultural Studies from the University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy, where she was also granted a Master’s Degree in Foreign Language Teaching (2007). She held Visiting Scholar appointments during a four-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz (2011-12), and the University of California, Santa Barbara (2013-14). She has published extensively on postcolonial literatures in English and Italian, gender and queer theories, Mediterranean studies, contemporary Caribbean and Italian women writers. She is the author of two books, Il libro dei desideri. Scritture di deriva nella letteratura femminile diasporica in Nord America (Aracne, 2009), and La donna fantasma. Scritture e riscritture del gotico inglese (Iacobelli, 2013). Her latest publications include, among others, the journal articles, “The Gothic Mediterranean. Haunting Migrations and Critical Melancholia” (Journal of Mediterranean Studies 24.2, 2015), and “Women Crossing Borders. Elena Ferrante’s Smarginature Across Media” (California Italian Studies 10.2, 2020), as well as a book chapter entitled “Melancholia of Migration in the Transnational Italian Imaginary” in the volume The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture (2023). She regularly teaches lower-division Italian language classes, as well as upper-division courses on Italophone literature, cultural translation, women, gender and sexuality in Italy.