| NEW FACULTY: ROBERTA RICCI
Our series of brief profiles of new tenure-track faculty members concludes
this week with the Italian Department's Roberta Ricci. Other profiles in the series:
Assistant Professor Roberta Ricci, new to the Italian department this year, is cheerfully settling in here at Bryn Mawr. "It's a perfect fit," she says —"a good combination of teaching and scholarship." Ricci, who grew up in Pisa and earned a maste's degree from the University of Pisa, came to the United States to pursue her doctorate in Italian Studies. After graduating from Johns Hopkins in 1998, she taught at Duke University, Sarah Lawrence College and Seton Hall University before coming to Bryn Mawr.
Ricci says that she would like to help create a "campus network" to support the Italian department's students, beyond the existing Italian table — a weekly lunch table where only Italian is spoken — and Italian film series. Ricci also hopes to expand the department itself, saying that she would like to "focus on creating new interdisciplinary courses, offered both in Italian and in English, that can attract students from other departments and can be cross-listed with film studies and comparative literature."
Her research spans disciplines in the same way. Ricci's academic interests bridge Medieval and Renaissance literature, critical theory and women's studies. One of her most recent articles, "Sex? Love? No, Let Us Talk About Marriage: Boccaccio's Onesta Brigata Back to Reality," was published in a collection of essays entitled Misogynism in Literature. The study examines Boccaccio's famous last tale in the Decameron: "I ask why this otherwise revolutionary collection of tales ends with such a vehement misogynistic story," she said. Ricci just concluded a new article, entitled "The Naked Woman in the Arms of Hypnos: Maritalis Affectio as a Happy Ending? (Decameron V, 1)", with which she continues to explore misogyny in another novella in Boccaccio's Decameron, questioning the final happy ending of the tale.
Ricci is now working on two separate volumes: as a co-editor, with Professor of Italian and department chair Nicholas Patruno, of a collection of essays dedicated to Primo Levi and the Holocaust, and on her manuscript titled (Self) Reflexivity: Authorial Criticism in the Italian Literary Tradition. In her book, Ricci says, she analyzes "different forms of commentaries upon and within their own works written by medieval and Renaissance Italian authors, from footnotes to letters, from prefaces to critical essays, from interviews to autobiographies." She looks at the formal problems inherent in self-commentary and examines the attempts of writers to shape the meaning and significance of a text.
Despite the many claims on her time, Ricci never forgets her students. "Both teaching and scholarship are very important to me," she says, "and I do not see them as separate activities. Teaching to Bryn Mawr students has been an exciting and very fulfilling experience for me since I first walked into my classrooms last fall. The students here are challenging, curious, motivated — and last but not least — very friendly. In coming to work at Bryn Mawr I expected a very selective body of students. Nevertheless I did not know that after two semesters I could already feel so rewarded by class discussions and intellectual exchange with both students and colleagues. This remains a crucial incentive for me."
— Allison Siegenthaler <<Back
to Bryn Mawr Now 4/7/2005
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