L’Orientale University, Naples, Italy

Palazzo S. Maria Porta Coeli - Via Duomo, 219 - 80138 Napoli - Studio 405 - IV piano

Email:  dizzo@unior.it

Phone:  +39 0816909852

 

Bio sketch:

Donatella Izzo is Professor of American Literature at Università Orientale. She graduated in American literature in 1978 and was awarded her post-graduate degree in Modern Literary Studies from Università di Roma “La Sapienza” in 1981. She taught English literature and American literature at the universities of Pescara and Salerno and has been teaching at Orientale since 1994. Prof. Izzo has coordinated several research projects and organized national and international conferences and panels, and she regularly presents papers at national and international conferences. She is the general editor (with G. Mariani and S. Rosso) of Ácoma. Rivista internazionale di studi nordamericani and a member of the editorial board of Anglistica, between (the journal of the Italian association of comparative literature and literary theory) and The Henry James Review (published by the Johns Hopkins UP). With Giorgio Mariani she directs the book series Sapienza Studies in American Literature and Culture at Sapienza University Press. She is on the advisory board of the section “Dialoghi” of Katoptron, a series in Classical and Comparative Literature published at Verona University as well as on the board of the "Centro Studi sui Linguaggi delle Identità" at Bergamo University. Since 2004 she has been on the Faculty of "The Futures of American Studies Institute" directed by Donald E. Pease at Dartmouth College (USA), becoming a co-director in 2012. In 2007 and 2008 she was on the Faculty of the Summer School held at the Clinton Institute for American Studies of University College, Dublin. Since 2012 she has co-directed (with Giorgio Mariani) OASIS - Orientale American Studies International School, convened every other year in Procida, at Università "Orientale"'s conference center. She was President of AISNA, the Italian Association of American Studies, for the term 2005-2007 and President of the International Henry James Society in 2011. Since 2008 she has been a Fellow of the Collegium of World Literary History in Stockholm, on behalf of which she has been in charge of the United States section of "Literature: A World History" (a multivolume project to be published by Blackwell). She was on the Executive Committee of IASA (International American Studies Association) for the term 2010-13. She is best known internationally for her scholarly work on Henry James and on American Studies, on which she has published extensively. She has also published on British and American writers, especially Melville, Howells, and Fitzgerald, literary and gender theory, cross-cultural literary rewritings, American studies as a disciplinary field, comparative literature, Asian American literature, American TV series, the graphic novel in the US, as well as philosophical and ideological implications of detective narratives.