Meriel Tulante

Professor of Italian Studies
Program Director, Hallmarks Core for General Education

Contact Information

tulante

4201 Henry Avenue
Ravenhill Mansion
Philadelphia, PA 19129

Email Meriel Tulante

215-951-2607

Professor of Italian Studies
Program Director, Hallmarks Core for General Education

Education

PhD, AM, Romance Languages and Literature, Harvard University
BA, French and Italian, Cambridge University

Publications (selected)

  • 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. 

FOCUS AREAS

Italy, literature, fashion, film