Meriel Tulante
Associate Professor of Italian Studies
Program Director, Hallmarks Core for General Education
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Meriel Tulante
Associate Professor of Italian Studies
Program Director, Hallmarks Core for General Education
Focus Areas
Italy, literature, fashion, film
Education
PhD, AM, Romance Languages and Literature, Harvard University
BA, French and Italian, Cambridge University
Publications
- Di Nino, Nicola and Meriel Tulante eds. “Revisioning / Revisiting Naples in the New Millennium”, NeMLA Italian Studies XLIV (2023).
- Tulante, Meriel, “Naples as Heterodoxy: Seventeenth-century Female Heresies in Sebastiano Vassalli’s Io, Partenope,” NeMLA Italian Studies XLIV (2023) 174–186.
- Tulante, Meriel, Italian Chimeras: Narrating Italy through the Writing of Sebastiano Vassalli (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020)
- Tulante, Meriel. “Sebastiano Vassalli”. The Literary Encyclopedia Volume 1.6.1: Italian Writing and Culture, 453. eds Carla Bregman, Jo Ann Cavallo (2017)
- Tulante, Meriel, “A House in Flames: Environmental Ethics in the Work of Sebastiano Vassalli” in Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild ed. Pasquale Verdicchio, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books 2016: 79-96.
- Tulante, Meriel, “Milan in Senegal: Immigration and National Identity in the Novels of Pap Khouma”, in L'Italia allo specchio, eds. Fabio Finotti and Marina Johnston, Venice: Marsilio, 2015: 297-309.
- Tulante, Meriel, “High Fashion in Film: Italian Identity and Global Anxiety in Valentino: The Last Emperor and Gomorra,” Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 1:3 (September 2013), 245–262.
Awards
Cornerstone: Learning for Living (Teagle Foundation/NEH, $250,000, planning grant $25,000), 2020-2024.
Research Interest
Dr. Tulante’s research has centered on the novelist Sebastiano Vassalli (1941-2015), about whom she has published Italian Chimeras: Narrating Italy through the Writing of Sebastiano Vassalli (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020). Other research interests include the intersection between Italian fashion and film, exploring how national identity is manifested through cinema and dress. She also considers migrant/postcolonial writing in Italian, where she considers questions of diaspora and identity in the work of women migrant or second-generation authors.
Biography
Dr. Tulante graduated with a PhD in Italian Studies with a sub-specialization in French from Harvard University. She teaches Italian language courses as well as courses in the Hallmarks program that focus on literature, film, and cultural studies in the Global Diversity category.
Her research centers on the work of the Italian author Sebastiano Vassalli (1941-2016). She is completing a book about his career as well as the post-war Italian society he narrated. Other research interests include postcolonial and migrant literature in Italy and the intersection between fashion and film in an Italian context.