Comparative Literature Program

Prof. Pireddu is a specialist in Comparative Literature. She holds an Italian laurea, and doctoral degrees from both Italy and the United States. Her research revolves around European literary and cultural relations, with particular attention to the Italian, French and British domains from the nineteenth-century to the present; literary and critical theories; anthropological approaches to literature; history of ideas; translation studies.

The seminars she has created and offered at Georgetown in Italian and Comparative Literature have allowed her to explore with her students such topics as myth, primitivism, and the question of cultural exchanges; the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde in literature and the arts; authorship, autobiography, and the relationship between genre and gender; science as a motif and formal principle in literary works within the "two-cultures" debate; decadence, modernism, and postmodernism; realism and the fantastic; law, justice and truth in detective fiction; Europeanness in modern and contemporary literatures and cultures; theoretical and practical questions of literary writing and translation, also on the basis of her experience as a freelance translator.

Active in many professional organizations in the US, Italy, and Europe at large, Professor Pireddu has published over 40 articles in American and European books and journals on a variety of authors among which D'Annunzio, Gadda, Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Wilde, Mantegazza, Huysmans Angela Carter, Vattimo, Foucault, Vernon Lee, Mallarmé, De Quincey.

She is the recipient of the 2003 American Association for Italian Studies book award for her volume _Antropologi alla corte della bellezza. Decadenza ed economia simbolica nell'Europa fin de siecle_ (Fiorini, 2002), a study of the relationships between decadent aesthetics and the anthropological discourse on gift-economy in turn-of-the-century European culture. Prof. Pireddu's book-length publications also include the first English annotated edition of selected works by Paolo Mantegazza, _The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ (U of Toronto P, 2007) and an edition of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, for the "Great Authors" series at Loffredo Editore.

Prof. Pireddu's research has been sponsored by fellowships and grants from numerous institutions among which the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Howard Foundation at Brown University. In 2005 she received the Georgetown University Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2008 she was the winner of the first prize of the "Mario Soldati" international literary award for criticism and journalism, sponsored by the Italian research institute "Centro Pannunzio" under the high patronage of the President of the Italian Republic.

Before her appointment at Georgetown, she taught in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University and in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Houston, offering courses in Italian and French language and literature.