University of Virginia

Faculty Member, Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies

Lecturer

University of Virginia

About

Marika Preziuso

Contact Information

School of Continuing and Professional Studies

University of Virginia
104 Midmont Lane
P.O. Box 400764
Charlottesville VA 22902

Email : mp5yc@virginia.edu
marika.preziuso@googlemail.com
Cell phone : (434) 409 1564

Education
Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. Dept of English. PhD. Title: “Mapping the Lived–Imagined Caribbean,” Sept 2009.
Birkbeck College. Dept of English. MA, Gender and Cultural Studies, Sept 2002.
Università La Sapienza, Rome, Italy. MA, Translation Studies, Sept 2001.
Università di Salerno, Italy. BA (Honors first class), Modern European Languages and Literature (English, French and German), Nov 2000.
University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, Diploma, English and American Literature, June 1998.
Fields of Teaching Experience
Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean Literature; Latino Literature; Postcolonial Literature; World Literature; Women’s Studies; Developmental Writing; Academic Skills and ESL; Survey in Contemporary Anglophone Literature; Beginner Spanish; Beginner and Intermediate French; Italian Language (all levels) and Literature.

Teaching Positions
May –June 2012
UVA “Semester at Sea” Program – Lecturer of Caribbean and Latin American Literature – Voyage Maymester 2012.

Spring Term 2012
Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies (BIS), University of Virginia. Instructor.

June–July 2010
Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (UADY), Merida, Mexico, Anthropology Department. Visiting Assistant Professor.

November 2004–April 2010
Birkbeck College, University of London, Department of Education and Social Policy. Lecturer.

September 2006–June 2008
Birkbeck College, University of London, Department of English. Lecturer.

2005 and 2006, Spring Terms
London Metropolitan University, Caribbean Study Centre. Lecturer.

October 2004–June 2010
Beaumont Language School – Middle and Upper School – St. Albans, Hertfordshire, UK. Italian Language Tutor.

Courses Taught

Spring 2012
University of Virginia, Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies: Key Elements of  Cultural Analysis: The Production of the Human through the Production of the Text. Through an introduction to several key figures who have shaped ideas in the Humanities and Social Sciences, from the Renaissance to the present (from Niccolò Macchiavelli via Sigmund Freud to Roland Barthes and Donna Haraway), this course examines “the production of the human,” that is to say, the changing understanding of what it means to be human, and the ways in which human capabilities and needs are historically contingent. This is a writing-intensive course, which will engage the students in critical thinking, research methods, and basic and specific conventions of academic writing across the disciplines.
Summer 2010
Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mexico, Faculty of Anthropology. Elective course to final year undergraduates: Crossing Borders in Caribbean Literature. The course explores the concept of boundaries, border-spaces and frontiers in the literature of contemporary Caribbean writers in the region and the diaspora, which will lead students to a questioning of boundaries from a variety of perspectives: linguistics, gender, genres, geography and politics.
2004–2010
Birkbeck College, Department of Social Policy and Education: Approaches to Humanities with Language Support. The course introduces the students to contemporary concepts, debates, and perspectives that are relevant to the study of social sciences, arts, and humanities subjects. It also provides them with the opportunity to improve their English language skills to enable them to participate more fully in all aspects of their academic life

Birkbeck College, Department of English and Humanities. Writing and Composition, English for Academic Purposes, Research Methods for Graduate Students and International Students.
2005–2006
London Metropolitan University, Caribbean Studies Centre.
Second year, core course: The Literature from the French Caribbean since 1930. The course introduces the historical, sociopolitical and sociopsychological context of literature in the Francophone Caribbean.  It examines the development of this literature from the 1930s to the present – Négritude and the work of its main proponents in the 1930s and 40s; Antillanité in the 1970s; Créolité in the 1980s – and the importance of women writers from this region.

Second year, core course: An Introduction to Caribbean Film and Literature. The course invites the students to consider how cinematic and literary representations might assist with an understanding of economic, social and political processes in the region. It also invites them to consider the similarities and differences between the novel and the film as instruments of creative expression.


Research Positions
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH), Charlottesville, Fellow. September 2010– December 2011.

Latineos New Approaches to Latin American and Caribbean Culture www.latineos.com Researcher and Writer. September 2010 – present.

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL) Leuven, Belgium, Research Centre of Literary Relations and Post/National Identities, Faculty of Languages and Literatures. Visiting Research Fellow. January 2010–December 2010.

Loughborough University, UK, Department of Geography, Project “Space and Place in Translation: Postcolonial Geographies in the Work of Wilson Harris and Maryse Condé.”  Research Associate. September 2008–April 2009.

Write Black British: from Postcolonialism to Black British Literature, Hansib Publications Ltd, Editor and Researcher. March 2005.

Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, Martinique, Department of Modern Languages and Literature. Visiting Research Fellow. October 2004.
Universidad de la Havana, Cuba, Department of English. Visiting Research Fellow.  November 2004.

Languages
Native Italian. Reading, writing, and speaking fluency in Spanish and French. Experience as literary and technical (legal, medical) translator from English to Italian, Spanish and French.

Member of the American Translators Association (ATA) since July 2011
Selection of Publications

Book-length Projects

Mapping the Lived-Imagined Caribbean: Writers in the Diaspora. Five-chapter manuscript that examines literature from selected contemporary writers of Caribbean origins who live in the USA as their work engages with the “trope” of hybridity, cross-culturally and throughout the history of the region and its diaspora. The five writers examined in the book are:  Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Rosario Ferré and Achy Obejas.
To be published by UVA Press – New World Series, Spring 2013.

Perspectives on the ‘Migrant Cosmopolitans’: Transcultural Narratives of Contemporary Postcoloniality. Edited collection of eleven scholarly and creative essays that examine and test the representations of migrant writers and artists as “cosmopolitan.” Peter Lang Postcolonial Series Publishers. 30 August 2012.

Articles
“One Master for Another? Ambivalent Authorship in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies,” to appear in the issue “Placing the Archipelago: Interconnections and Extensions,” Sargasso, A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language and Culture, University of Puerto Rico, Spring 2012.

“Liberating Border and Sensual Veils: Edwidge Danticat’s Poetics of Haiti’s ‘Vulnerability’,” in Academica Press, Latin American Studies: Critiques of Contemporary Cinema, Literatures, Politics and Revolution, edited by David Gallagher, April 1 2012.

P. Noxolo and M. Preziuso, “Space and Place in Translation: Language and Materiality in the Novels of Wilson Harris and Maryse Condé,” Interventions, Fall 2011. 

P. Noxolo and M. Preziuso, “Postcolonial Imaginations: Approaching a ‘Fictionable’ World through the Novels of Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, December 14, 2011. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00045608.2011.628251

“Literary Authorship and the Diasporic Imagination: Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” in Alison Donnell and Michael Bucknor (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literatures, London, June 2011.

“Llevando el Velo y Cruzando la Frontera: Geografías Imaginarias en The Farming of Bones por Edwidge Danticat,” Hipertexto, University of Texas-Pan American, no.12, Summer 2010 (E- journal).

“Mapping the Lived–Imagined Caribbean: Postcolonial Geographies in the Literature of the ‘Diasporic’ Caribbean,” Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 31 issue 2, April 2010.

“Julia Alvarez’s Mirabal Sisters between Dominican Myths, (Failed) Feminist Icons and National Metaphors,” http://www.cielonaranja.com/preziuso.htm

“Do I belong here? Images of Belonging and Cultural Hybridity in Erna Brodber’s Myal, Velma Pollard’s Homestretch and Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge,” in Journal of Caribbean Literatures, vol. IV, no. 1.
Interviews

“Interview with Junot Diaz,” to appear in Callaloo, Spring 2012.

“Interview with Maryse Condé” (in French and English), 25th Anniversary Issue of Sargasso, August 2011.

“Interview with NourbeSe Philip” - Latineos New Approaches to Latin American and Caribbean Culture. September 2010
http://latineos.com/en/articles/literature/item/46-m-nourbese-philip-zong.html

“Interview with Achy Obejas,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism, November 3, 2010 (online):
http://smallaxe.net/wordpress3/interviews/2010/10/27/interview-with-achy-obejas/

“Intervista a bell hooks” (in English and translated into Italian), Kuma’ – Creolizzare L’Europa, online journal ed. Armando Gnisci, Università La Sapienza, Rome, Italy, no.12, October 2006.

Translations
“The Contemporary Dominican Literature in the Caribbean Perspective,” translation from Spanish of Dr Rita de Maeseneer, “Encuentro con la narrativa dominicana contemporanea,” in Lieven D’Hulst et al (eds.), Caribbean Interfaces, Amsterdam: Rodopi.

“The Ghosts of Strangers,” translation of Dr Maurizio Calbi’s “‘Le Maschere di Otello’ in The Nature of Blood by Caryl Phillips.” Elio Di Piazza, Daniela Corona and Marcella Romeo (eds.), Maschere dell’Impero. Percorsi coloniali della letteratura inglese. Pisa: ETS, 2005.
Selected Conference Papers

“Dangerous Creations: Changing Paradigms in Recent Caribbean Cultural Productions,” Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) Conference, Curaçao, May 30–June 3, 2011.

Co-organizer, panel “Cultures of Migration: Local Cosmopolitanisms,” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Conference. Paper presented: “On Writing ‘Troubled’ Countries: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies.” New Orleans, March 2010.

Patricia Noxolo and Marika Preziuso, “Geographies of Postcolonial Textuality: Place and Language in the Work of Wilson Harris and Maryse Condé,” presented at the American Tropics Conference, University of Essex, July 2009.

“Mapping the Lived through the Imagined Caribbean,” presented at the Postcolonial Studies Association (PSA) conference “Re-Imagining Identity: New Directions in Postcolonial Studies,” Waterford, Ireland, May 2009.

Patricia Noxolo and Marika Preziuso, “Dreaming a Caribbean-routed Postcolonial Space: Harris’s Jonestown and Conde’s La Colonie du Nouveau Monde as Critical Cartographies,” presented at the Association of American  Geographers (AAC) Conference, Las Vegas, 28–31 March 2009.

“‘Local Touch – Global Reach?’ Julia Alvarez and the Romanticized Displacement of Dominican History,” presented at the conference “Writing the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Literature,” University of Warwick, UK, 25 February 2006.

“Trajectories of Creolization: Jean Rhys and Maryse Condé.” Jean Rhys Literary Festival, Roseau, Dominica, June 2004.
Invited Speaker

“Mapping Caribbean Identities in the Diaspora,” guest lecture delivered at the “Introduction to Africana Studies” course, English Department, College of William and Mary, Virginia, November 9, 2011.

Guest Lecturer, “Women and Global Change” course, Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Virginia, May 26, 2011.

Lunch Talk “Mapping the Lived–Imagined Caribbean: Counter-Narratives of Hybridity in the Literature from the Caribbean Diaspora,” Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, May 3, 2011.

Moderator of the panel “Writing Memoirs” at the Virginia Book Festival, Charlottesville, VA. March 16, 2011.
Invited speaker at the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Manchester, UK, “Wearing the Veil of the Border: Identity Myths in the Border Region between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.” 19 April 2005.

Academic Service
September 2009–June 2010
Birkbeck, University of London, “My Birkbeck,” Students’ Support Program. Study Skills Advisor.
2008–present

Member of the Committee for the Graduate Student Initiatives, Caribbean Studies Association (CSA)

2007–2009
Research Students’ Representative, Research School, Birkbeck College.

October 2004–2010
Teacher, Proofreader and Editor, Writing Program – Birkbeck, University of London.

Grants and Awards
September 2010–October 2011, Fellowship, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH).
2010-2011, Recipient of the Emilia Galla Struppa Fellowship for Research in South Atlantic Studies, VFH. 
November 2010, Travel Grant, MLA Conference, LA, January, 2011.
October–December 2003, Research Grant, the University of London Central Fund to conduct research at the University of Havana, Cuba, and the University of the Antilles and Guyana (UAG), Martinique.
2002–2006, Fees-only Scholarship towards the completion of PhD, University of London Research School.
2001–2002, Scholarship from Università di Salerno, towards the completion of MA at Birkbeck College, University of London.
1997–1998, Erasmus Student Exchange Program funded by the European Commission (EU), the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.

Professional Referees  (Dossier available upon request)

Dr. Robert Vaughan
President, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH)
145 Ednam Drive
22903 Charlottesville, VA
Phone: 434-924-3296
Email: rcv@virginia.edu

Prof. Jean Stubbs
Director, Institute for the Study of the Americas
School of Advanced Study
University of London
Phone:  44-(0) 7862 8870 
Email: Jean.Stubbs@sas.ac.uk

Prof. Elvira Pulitano
Ethnic Studies. California Polytechnic State University. San Luis Obispo, CA
Phone: 805-756-1409
Email: epulitan@calpoly.edu

Dr. Alison Donnell
Reader and Director of Research, Department of English and American
Literature, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading,
Whiteknights,
PO Box 218, Reading, RG6 6AA, UK
Phone: +44-118-378-7837
Email: a.j.donnell@reading.ac.uk

Prof. Margaret Shrimpton Masson
Coordinadora de la Licenciatura en Literatura Latinoamericana
Facultad de Ciencias Antropológicas
Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mérida, México
Tel: +52-999-930-0090
maggieshrimpton@yahoo.com.mx


Prof. Anton L. Allahar
The University of Western Ontario
Department of Sociology
London, Ontario
CANADA – N6A 5C2
Ph: 519-661-3606
Fax: 529-661-3200
Email: allahar@uwo.ca

Contact Information