Italian Studies

The main focus of Sergio Parussa's research and publications is the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in twentieth-century Italian literature, in particular, how authors who write from a culturally marginal perspective challenge the highly coded Italian literary tradition. His dissertation at Brown, written under the direction of M. Riva, was published in 2003 with the title Eros Onnipotente: erotismo, letteratura e impegno nell'opera di Pier Paolo Pasolini e Jean Genet. He has investigated the relationship between Judaism and writing in contemporary Italian literature, in his second book, Writing as Freedom, Writing as Testimony: Four Italian Writers and Judaism (Syracuse University Press, 2008).