- Assistant Teaching Professor of Italian | Coordinator, Italian Program
- Email: hilary.a.emerson@uri.edu
Biography
Professor Emerson teaches Italian language, literature, and film at the University of Rhode Island. Dr. Emerson is the coordinator of the Beginning and Intermediate Italian Language Program as well as the faculty advisor for the Italian Club. Teaching specializations include: Italian language and society, modern and contemporary literature, film and media studies, and feminist and gender studies.
Research
Research interests include: Lina Mangiacapre’s avant-garde films, transnational feminist cinema, girlhood in European cinema, Italian film, film theory, ecofeminist theory, and mad studies. Pedagogical interests include: diversity and inclusion, intercultural learning, and film literacies — a pedagogical approach based on the multiliteracies framework.
Dr. Emerson’s current book project, which started in the archives of Naples and Rome, analyzes Lina Mangiacapre’s avant-garde feminist films. By addressing the work of an understudied writer and director, this project throws light on Mangiacapre’s notable yet neglected contributions to Italian literary and film history. Through an analysis of Mangiacapre’s manifestos, antinovels, films, the book explores the emancipatory potential of breaking the bounds of narrative, documentary, film, and society.
Education
• Ph.D., Italian with a specialization in Gender & Film Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• B.A., Italian Studies & International Relations, Wheaton College (MA), summa cum laude
Selected Publications
Brunazzo, Alessandro, Hilary Emerson, Enrico Gheller, Marco Ruggieri, and Stella Scabelli. “Writing and Rewriting Italian Cinema and Media History: Five New Dissertations.” Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 12, 2 (2024): 307-315.
Emerson, Hilary. “Reframing Madness with Avant-Garde Film: Lina Mangiacapre’s Feminist Collaboration at the Asylum.” The Italianist 41, 2 (2021): 323-337.
Brugnolo, Furio. “Continuation and Conclusion of an Interpretation of Dante’s Vita nuova XXII,” trans. by Hilary Emerson, in Interpretation and Visual Poetics in Medieval and Early Modern Texts, ed. by Beatrice Arduini, Isabella Magni, and Jelena Todorović, 204-216. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2021.