Barbara Alfano
Director of First-Year Forum, Faculty in Cultural Studies and Languages, Bennington College
Center for Community News
BIO
2025 CCN Champion
A native of Italy, Barbara Alfano, Ph.D, specializes in 20th- and 21st-centuryItalian fiction, with a focus on women’s writing, representations of America, issues of identity, love studies, and ethics and literature. She is the writer of The Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film (University of Toronto Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Italian Quarterly’s special issue, “Projecting Americanism Abroad: Italy in the Cold War” (2019).
Her essays have appeared in Italica, Forum Italicum, Oblio, Quaderni d’Italianistica, and Romance Studies among other journals. She curates Stanford’s Arcade’s literary salon on Elena Ferrante. In 2009, she published her first collection of short stories in Italian, Mi chiedevo. Before moving to the United States in 1999, Alfano worked in Naples as a journalist and translator.
At Bennington College, she is the Director of First-Year Forum and a faculty member in Cultural Studies and Languages.
Bio
2025 CCN Champion
A native of Italy, Barbara Alfano, Ph.D, specializes in 20th- and 21st-centuryItalian fiction, with a focus on women’s writing, representations of America, issues of identity, love studies, and ethics and literature. She is the writer of The Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film (University of Toronto Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Italian Quarterly’s special issue, “Projecting Americanism Abroad: Italy in the Cold War” (2019).
Her essays have appeared in Italica, Forum Italicum, Oblio, Quaderni d’Italianistica, and Romance Studies among other journals. She curates Stanford’s Arcade’s literary salon on Elena Ferrante. In 2009, she published her first collection of short stories in Italian, Mi chiedevo. Before moving to the United States in 1999, Alfano worked in Naples as a journalist and translator.
At Bennington College, she is the Director of First-Year Forum and a faculty member in Cultural Studies and Languages.