Gaetana Marrone Puglia is a Professor of Italian at the University of Princeton. She specializes in modern Italian literature and postwar Italian cinema. A native of Italy, she earned a Doctorate in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Palermo and a Ph. D. in Italian Literature from Northwestern University. Principal publications include articles in the 19th- and 20th-century literature, film, political and cultural studies. She is the author of La drammatica di Ugo Betti: Tematiche e archetipi (1988; American Association of Italian Studies Presidential Award); New Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema (1999), edited for Annali d’Italianistica; The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani (2000; Scaglione Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association of America); Lo sguardo e il labirinto (2003; rev. and enlarged Italian edition); a critical edition of Ugo Betti’s Delitto all’isola delle capre (2006); and is General Editor of a two-volume Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies (2007; First Prize, Fondazione Internazionale Rubbettino). She is currently writing a book on Francesco Rosi.
Prof. Marrone has also produced award winning films, including Woman in the Wind, starring the late Colleen Dewhurst (1988); a documentary feature on Princeton’s intellectual and social history, Images of a University (1996); Zefirino: The Voice of a Castrato, a documentary film that traces the artistic evolution of the famed castrati singers (2007).
Her teaching interests include courses on the Risorgimento, performance in modern Italian theatre, freshmen seminars on history and cinema, as well as interdisciplinary courses on European cinema in conjunction with the Program in Visual Arts, the Program in the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and the University Center for Human Values.
In recognition of her academic and scholarly accomplishments, she received the Honorary Title of “Cavaliere dell’Ordine del Merito della Repubblica Italiana” in 2010.