Anastasia Valecce, Ph.D.

Title: Assistant Professor

Contact Information:
Cosby Academic Center, Room 450
avalecce@spelman.edu
404-270-5542





Degrees:
Ph.D. Emory University
M.A. in translation, Universita di lettere e filosofia, Siena (Italy)
B.A. in foreign languages and literature, Istituto Orientale, Naples (Italy)

Courses Taught:
Elementary Spanish 101 sec 4
Elementary Spanish 102 sec 2
Intermediate Spanish 201 sec 7
Intermediate Spanish 201 sec 8

Research Interests:
Contemporary Caribbean studies with a special focus on Cuba, performance studies, visual culture, film studies, and pop culture.

Recent Publications:
"Rome-Havana Round Trip: Cesare Zavattini Travels to Cuba", Small Axe (under revision), 2012

“(Re) presentando Cuba: Pájaros de la playa (re)visita La Habana.” Cuadernos de Literatura del Caribe e Hispanoamérica No.11. (pp 41-55). Cartagena: Ediciones Universidad de Cartagena- Universidad del Atlántico, 2011.

 DIÁLOGOS NEORREALISTAS: EL NEORREALISMO ITALIANO EN LA REVOLUCIÓN CUBANA (1959-1969) published in the online Actas Congreso Caribe 2010, Universidad de Cordoba, Argentina: http://blogs.ffyh.unc.edu.ar/centenariojoselezamalima/actas/.

Awards:
Emory University Laney Graduate School Competitive Professional Development Research
Funds, awarded in Fall 2010 for Spring 2011
Emory University Laney Graduate School Funding for Summer Workshop in Salamanca
(Spain) for Summer 2008

Born in the South of Italy, Anastasia is an Italian native speaker bilingual in Spanish. She completed her Bachelor’s studies in Foreign Languages and Literature in 2004 at the Università di Napoli “l’Orientale” in Italy (major in Spanish and English, minor in Portuguese) focusing on the Arabic Emigration in Argentina.

In fact, she wrote her first dissertation about this topic. She also obtained a Master’s degree in Literary Translation and Text Editing at the Università di Siena in Italy (2006). Since 2001 Anastasia has worked as an interpreter both from Spanish, Portuguese and English into Italian and from Italian into Spanish.

From 2005 to 200, she has worked for an Italian Publishing House and published three Latin American novels as translator; she also collaborated in several projects of translation. In 2006 she was at Emory for the first time with a scholarship to collaborate with the Italian department and she taught a high level undergraduate course about Southern Italian cultures. After that, she has been involved as art director in a documentary film about South Italian culture for the Italian Department at Emory University (2006). She also published her first poem written in Spanish in a Spanish anthology (2006).

She loves traveling, and has visited Europe, Africa and South America, spending long periods in Cuba, Argentina and Dominican Republic. She spent her life between Italy and Spain before coming to United States in 2006. 

Her main areas of interests are Contemporary Caribbean studies, with an emphasis on Cuba. Main areas of research include Latin American Film, and the intertextuality between Cuba and Italy. Her latest work focuses on notions of embodiment, intertextuality and performance studies.