Phd Graduate Students
Melissa Bertolini Rodrigues
Melissa Bertolini Rodrigues <
Maria Rosaria Garofalo
First-Year PhD Student
Email: m
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Translation Studies, Gender Studies, avant-garde and modernism, poetry and poetics, textual afterlives and cross-cultural circulation, medieval Romance literature.
Maria Rosaria Garofalo is a first-year Ph.D. student in Italian Studies at Rutgers University. Her research interests include Gender Studies and Translation Theory and Practice with a focus on cross-cultural reception, dialogue, and afterlives of texts. She is particularly concerned with voices at the margins of the 20th century Italian literary canon and has a strong interest in modernist and avant-garde figures.
She previously obtained an M.A. in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Calabria. While completing her studies, she gained experience as an English as a Foreign Language tutor at the Centro Linguistico d’Ateneo (CLA) and at the University's academic center for Physical and Learning Disabilities, where she provided both academic and administrative support. Prior to joining Rutgers, she worked as a teacher of French Language and Literature for the Italian Ministry of Education and as an Instructor of Italian as a Foreign and Second Language in New York.
Her academic training focuses on Literary Theory, Theory and Practice of Literary Translation, Women Writers, and War Writing and Experience. Her current research projects center on the recovery, revision, and translation of overshadowed voices in Italian literature. She will present her paper, “Italian Dialogues with Balzac: Afterlives of La Peau de chagrin through Sbarbaro and Zorzi,” at the 2026 NeMLA Convention.
Berlingo, Roberta
Contact Roberta Berlingo:
Spadavecchia, Erika
Labate, Addolorata
PhD Candidate
Email: a