Santa Clara University

Valerio Ferme

Department: Modern Languages
Title: Associate Professor and Toso Endowed Chair for Italian Studies

Office: Kenna 223
Phone: 408-554-4838
Email: vferme@scu.edu

Valerio Ferme was born in Milano, the third of 9 siblings. After completing his Maturità Classica from the Collegio San Carlo in Milano, he received his B.A. degrees in Biology and Religious Studies from Brown University in Providence, RI.The next few years he was a rowing coach at the U.S. Naval Academy and his alma mater, before returning to school to complete M.A. work in both Comparative Literature and Italian at Indiana University (Bloomington), and finally his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. While at Berkeley he received both a Chancellor Dissertation Fellowship and spent time in Italy as a Fulbright Scholar.

He spent the past 14 years teaching in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Colorado at Boulder where, with his colleagues, he was responsible for revamping the curriculum and greatly strengthening and increasing the numbers in the Italian side of the Department. During these years he received countless technology awards for his work with course development, including an online course and the largest course ever taught in the department (Intro to Italian Culture, 155 students). He spent the last 5 years as Chair of the Department and the last 2 and a half as Chair of the Curriculum Committee for the College of Arts and Science.Being interested in the intersections between teaching, student learning and community engagement, the decision to accept the post as Toso Endowed Chair at the University of Santa Clara was an easy one.

Professor Ferme has published a book, Tradurre è tradire (Longo: Ravenna, 2002) on the subversive uses of translation during the Fascist years. In addition, he is the author of over 25 articles on subjects as disparate as notions of Italian identity, Calvino, Alba DeCespedes, Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini and other 20th-century authors. In collaboration with Norma Bouchard he has translated and edited a critical edition of Franco Cassano's work (Southern Thought and Other Essays. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). His current projects are a collaborative study with Norma Bouchard on Mediterranean Thought and Aesthetics to be published in 2013; a monographic study on Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (to be completed in 2013); and two co-edited volumes, one on the topic of work and Labor in Italian Culture (special issue of Annali d'Italianistica, 2014), the other on the topic of Mediterranean representations of the City (due out also in 2014). He has also published a book of poetry in 1997.

Professor Ferme is active with a number of professional organizations. He was a MLA delegate for 5 years, and was the representative for the Rocky Mountain region of the American Association of Italian Studies. He has served for three years and continues to be on the Executive Board of the largest organization of Italian Studies in America (the AAIS) as its Secretary. He is on the editorial board of Annali d'Italianistica and has served as an external evaluator for a number of tenure reappointments and Ph.D. Thesis Examinations.

At Santa Clara, he looks forward to connecting with the Italian-American community and to reinvigorating his own teaching in novel and diverse ways, leaning on his colleagues and the Santa Clara community to ensure that we put the Italian back in Santa Clara, since the university itself was founded by two Italian Jesuits.

Italian Literature and Aesthetics

20th-Century Italian Literature

Modernism and the Avant-Garde

Translation Theory and Practice

Mediterranean Studies

Film Studies

Boccaccio and the Decameron

Teaching Practices and Media

Southern Thought and Other Essays. Translated and edited with an introduction by Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

"Carmine Amoroso's "Cover Boy": Romania, Not Rome, Holds our Hopes" Italian Quarterly, n. 177-178 (2011): 45-68.

"I versi della tribú: Tradizione, mito e memoria ne La vigna vecchia di Leonardo Sinisgalli" in Leonardo Sinisgalli: Terra, poesia e mito. Vol. 1. Bari: Laterza, 2011: 76-91.

"Una lunga fedeltà: Sherwood Anderson nel linguaggio e nelle tematiche pavesiane." Forum Italicum: Special Issue in Commemoration of Cesare Pavese, Fall 2010.

"Torello and the Saladin (X,9): Notes on Panfilo, Day X and the Ending Tale of the Decameron," Mediaevalia et Humanistica, n. 35 (2009): 33-55.

"Illness and Sexuality as Writing Metaphors in Pier Vittorio Tondelli's Camere separate," Italica, v. 84 (2007), n. 4: 88-109.

"Note critiche sulle traduzioni inglesi di Una donna di Sibilla Aleramo," Testo a fronte [Milano], 37 (2007): 88-112.

"Against Marriage and Child-Rearing: Alba De Cèspedes' Nessuno torna indietro vis-à-vis the Social Framework of Mussolini's Pro-Natal, Pro-Marriage Campaigns of the Ventennio," Italian Quarterly, v. 43 (Fall), 2006: 48-61.

"Gay, Feminist, and Arbëresh: Marginal Italian Identities in the Fiction of Aldo Busi, Rossana Campo, and Carmine Abate," Annali d'Italianistica, 24 (2006): 133-158.

"The City and Memory in Vittorio Sereni's Gli strumenti umani," Italian Quarterly, v. 40 (Fall), 2003: 45-54.

"The Americanization of Italian Culture under Fascism," Quaderni del '900 [Roma], 2002 (2): 51-69 (published 2003).

Tradurre è tradire: La traduzione come sovversione culturale sotto il Fascismo, Longo: Ravenna, 2002.

"Translating the Babel of Horror: Primo Levi's Catharsis through Language in the Holocaust Memory Se questo è un uomo." Italica, v. 78 (2001), n. 1: 53-74.

"Travel and Repetition in the Work of Alessandro Baricco: Reconfiguring the Real through the Myth of the Eternal (?) Return," Italian Culture, v. xviii (2000), n. 1: 49-69.

"The English Translation of Aleramo's Una donna: A Political Reinterpretation of the Sybil's Vision." American Journal of Italian Studies, 22 (1999): 132-148.

"Cesare Pavese's Translation of Sinclair Lewis's Our Mr. Wrenn: Language and Resistance under the Fascist Regime," Italian Culture, 1998, XVI, 1: 111-127.

"Che ve ne sembra dell'America?: Notes on Elio Vittorini's Translation Work and William Saroyan," Italica, 1998, Fall, 75: 3, 377-398.

"Aldo Busi's Gay Detectives: The Otherness of Homosexual Discourse as a Mystery-Solving Tool," Pacific Coast Philology, 1998, Fall, 33:1, 58-67.

"Redefining the Aesthetics of Fascism: The Battle between the Ancients and the Moderns Revisited," Symposium, 1998, Summer, 52: 2, 67-84 (lead article).

Diario italo-americano: Poesie 1989-1996, Pescara: Ed. Tracce, 1997.