Nancy Caronia

Assistant Professor | Paul & Ann Rubio Endowed Professor of Italian American Studies

My work focuses on the intersections of gender and ethnicity and race within Italian Diaspora and American literature, film, and culture. My current book project, Permeable Boundaries: Intimacy and Activism in the Work of Women Writers of Italian Descent, focuses on the under-examined work of women writers of Italian descent, drawing on examples from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Narratives by the women writers I study upend simplistic stories of struggle, success, and assimilation, and instead detail how racialization, homophobia, and misogyny within a dominant culture are exacerbated within local communities, whether the protagonists reside in a new homeland or are remembering their home of origin. These narratives reveal how white ethnic female bodies are treated in hostile ways, and how women and girls of Italian descent learn to navigate precarious landscapes.

Permeable Boundaries confronts the power structures in which protagonists reside with separation and absence emerging as destructive rather than regenerative forces. By placing these women writers—novelists, playwrights, and memoirists—and their work in conversation, I break down the borders of nationalist migration stories, which push women’s stories to the margin. This multi-genre grouping furthers discussions of autonomy, community, and politics, and Permeable Boundaries establishes the importance of moving beyond urban areas or sites of obvious migration and national borders. These women authors share a radical vision of those who are ignored, and their scorching narratives upend sanitized tales of immigration and women’s empowerment. This project has received funding from the West Virginia Humanities Council, the West Virginia University Humanities Center, The Working-Class Studies Association, and NeMLA.

Additionally, I am one of three founding members of the Italian Diaspora Archive Research Map (IDARM) project, which is focused on the history and culture of Italians in the tri-state area. The project’s goals are 1) to make the region’s Italian diaspora archival resources more visible and discoverable for researchers of all kinds; 2) to ensure sustainable, reliable preservation of and accessibility to the region’s Italian diaspora archival and material collections; and 3) to strengthen regional Italian diaspora archival networks and create more robust channels of communication and collaboration, to enhance and standardize archival cataloging, digitization, and management in smaller, at-risk repositories. IDARM received an NEH Foundations-level Humanities Collections and Resources grant.

Education

• PhD, University of Rhode Island
• MA, SUNY Brockport
• BFA, Hofstra University

Research Interests

• Twentieth and Twenty-first century American literature and film
• Italian American Studies
• Italian Diaspora Studies
• Gender Studies
• Working-Class Studies

Publications/Research Listings

(select list)

• “State of Incarceration: Listening and Empathy in Creative Writing Workshops on the Inside.” Radical Teacher, 133.
• Caronia, Nancy, Lina Insana, and Melissa E. Marinaro. “Making Appalachian Italian American History Discoverable and Accessible.” Italian American Review.
• “Dime Novels and the Creation of the Italian Immigrant Criminal.” American Contact: Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History. Eds. Rhae Lynn Barnes and Glenda Goodman. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024, 333-341.
• “Refusing the Sentimental Italian Immigration Story in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven.” The Journal of Working Class Studies2 (2023): 5-24. Received the Working-Class Studies Association 2024 Russo and Linkon Award for Published Article or Essay for Academic and General Audiences.
• “The Criminal Body: Italian Racialization and Erasure in the Dime Novel.” Italian American Review2 (2019): 208-233.
• Caronia, Nancy and Edvige Giunta, eds. Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo. Fordham University Press, 2015 (paperback, 2019).
• Caronia, Nancy. “Resisting Displacement in Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe.” Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions: Aesthetics of Resistance. Eds. Caroline Brown and Johanna K. Garvey. Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. 19-50.
• Caronia, Nancy. “Fierce: Female Appetite in Louise DeSalvo’s Casting Off.” Introduction. Casting Off by Louise DeSalvo. Bordighera Press, 2014. xiii-xlix.