Barbara Alfano
Barbara Alfano brings a background in journalism, translation, and short-story writing in Italian to her study of 20th- and 21st-century Italian fiction.
Biography
Alfano transitioned into her role as Associate Dean in 2025, after holding a seventeen-year-long faculty position at Bennington in Cultural Studies and Languages. She has directed the First-Year Forum since 2021, centering the first-year course in project-based learning, enhancing student leadership by offering students a more prominent role as peer leaders, and expanding collaborations with the local community. A native of Italy, she specializes in 20th- and 21st-century Italian fiction, with a focus on women’s writing, representations of America, issues of identity, love studies, and ethics and literature. She is the writer of The Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film (University of Toronto Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Italian Quarterly’s special issue, “Projecting Americanism Abroad: Italy in the Cold War” (2019).
Her essays have appeared in Italica, Forum Italicum, Oblio, Quaderni d’Italianistica, and Romance Studies, among other journals. She curated Stanford’s Arcade’s literary salon on Elena Ferrante. In 2009, she published her first collection of short stories in Italian, Mi chiedevo. Before moving to the United States in 1999, Alfano worked in Naples as a journalist and translator.