University of Virginia Spanish, Italian & Portuguese

Professor of Italian and Associate Chair

Research: 19th and 20th century Italian fiction, historical narratives, Italian film.

Responsibilities: Director, Italian Undergraduate Program; Italian Major Advisor.

CRISTINA DELLA COLETTA is Professor of Italian and is currently serving as the associate chair of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. She holds a Laurea in Lingue e Letterature straniere from the Università di Venezia, Italy, an M.A. in Italian from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Italian from the University of California, at Los Angeles. Her interests include modern and contemporary Italian literature, particularly historical fiction, film and cultural studies, women studies, and the use of technology in the humanities. Cristina Della Coletta is the author of World’s Fairs, Italian-Style: The Great Expositions in Turin and Their Narratives, 1850-1915 (U of Toronto P. 2006). This book was awarded the Modern Language Association of America’s Fourth Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize in Italian Studies (2007).

She also wrote a book and numerous articoles on the metamorphoses of historical narratives in modern Italian fiction. She has authored several articles on film adaptation theories (Poe and Fellini, James M. Cain and Visconti; Tabucchi and Corneau), exotic narratives (Gozzano, Calvino), intertextuality (Berto, Bassani), feminism and utopianism (Banti, Ortese), historical narratives (Lampedusa, Morante, Eco), and the genre of the fantastic (Capuana).

As a 2009-11 IATH (Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) fellow, Della Coletta is working on Turin 1911: The World’s Fair in Italy, a multimedia research tool devoted to the “fabulous exposition” of 1911, the only World’s Fair ever held in Italy. She also created an instructional website devoted to Italian film.

Cristina Della Coletta has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including: IATH (2209-11), University of Virginia/Terza Università di Roma Research Grant (2001), the University of Virginia Teaching and Technology Fellowship (2000), and the University of Virginia Teaching Fellowship, (1998-1999). She was granted the Horace W. Goldsmith Distinguished Teaching Chair in 2002-2005.

Selected publications:
Crossing Cultural Borders: Encounters Between Fiction and Film (under evaluation).

World’s Fairs Italian-Style: The Great Expositions in Turin and Their Narratives, 1850-1915. Toronto, Canada: U of Toronto P, 2006.

Plotting the Past: Metamorphoses of Historical Narrative in Modern Italian Fiction. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1996.

“Biographies of Displacement and the Utopian Imagination: Anna Maria Ortese, Hannah Arendt and the Artist as ‘Conscious Pariah.” (forthcoming)