Maria Truglio

Maria Truglio is Associate Professor of Italian and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. She earned her BA from Wesleyan University in 1992 and her PhD from Yale in 2001. Dr. Truglio’s research interests include 19th- and 20th- century Italian literature, children’s literature, and critical methodologies, especially psychoanalysis, semiotics, and post-structuralism. In her book, Beyond the Family Romance: The Legend of Pascoli (University of Toronto Press, 2007), Truglio offers a psychoanalytic perspective of the work of Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912), one of Italy’s most celebrated and innovative poets, with a particular focus on the uncanny. In addition to her work on Pascoli and on Italian gothic writers, Dr. Truglio has published articles on Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo, and on the children’s books of Annie Vivanti, Umberto Eco and Eugenio Carmi, and Eugenio Cherubini. This research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Forum Italicum, Quaderni d’italianistica, Romanic Review, MLN: Modern Language Notes, and Children’s Literature. She has contributed an essay to the Modern Language Association’s volume onTeaching Pinocchio. Her current book project explores children’s literature in Italy from the unification period though the rise fascism (1860-1922), and has received funding from the Children’s Literature Association and from Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities.