Faculty
Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld
Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld is Associate Professor of Italian and Women's Studies at Vassar College. She is the author of "Born Illiterate: Gender and Representation in C.E.Gadda's Pasticciaccio" (University of Hull Press, UK , 1999). She is co-editor of an anthology on a major feminist Italian writer and playwrigh, Dacia Maraini, "The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini_ (Purdue University Press, 2000). Her recent research has been in the area of Italian cinema, and she has published articles on a number of Italian filmmakers: Lina Wertmüller's relation to feminism, Marco Risi's exploration of masculinity and Gianni Amelio's critique of Italian "neo-colonialism" . She is currently co-editing a collection of essays on the representation of the Balkans in European cinemas, and is also working on a manuscript on the politics of cultural repression in classic and contemporary Italian Cinema.
Every three years she teaches "Women in Italian Cinema": a look at various filmic portrayals of the female body, narratives of female subjectivity, articulations of female and feminine desires, and experiments with female and feminist agency. We consider the ways in which images of women and the "woman" are invested with culturally and historically specific meanings that intersect with other categories of identity such as race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. This study is accompanied by several pertinent works from feminist film theory. She has also incorporated American and Italian feminist theory in seminars offered to Italian majors, such as: Texts of Transgression, Constructions of National Identity in 20th Century Italy, Victims of Realism and Narratives of Colonialist, Postcolonialist, and Postmodern Italian Culture.