Pia L. Bertucci

Pia L. Bertucci holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is, since 2010, Director of the Italian Program at the University of South Carolina. She has served as Program Leader and Faculty Director for USC in Italy, Siena and for USC in Italy, Monte Castello. Her teaching and research interests include Italian Food Culture, Southern Italian literature, and Italian Women Writers. Her most recent publications are her chapters on the Neapolitan writers Elena Ferrante and Matilde Serao in two edited volumes. The first, entitled, “Mother Tongue and the Body: Navigating the Female Space in Ferrante’s and Serao’s Naples,” appeared in Representations of Female Identity in Italy (Cambridge Scholars 2017.) The second is “Spiritual Sustenance: Naples’ Soul Food in the Narrative Language of Matilde Serao and Elena Ferrante,” in Eve’s Sinful Bite: Foodscapes in Italian Women’s Writing, Culture, and Society (Bloomsbury 2020). Currently, she is completing a textbook on the Italian Language and Culture, Illumina: Nuovo Corso di Lingua e Cultura Italiana that will be published by Kendall Hunt in August of 2020. She is also working on a monograph on Italian and Italian American Food Culture, The Urban Peasant: Food Attitudes and Ethos in Italian Culture.