Rate My Professor Meriel Tulante

Meriel Tulante serves as Professor of Italian Studies and Program Director of the Hallmarks Core for General Education in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Thomas Jefferson University. She earned her PhD and AM in Romance Languages and Literature from Harvard University, as well as a BA in French and Italian from Cambridge University. In her leadership role, she has advanced innovative humanities education, including as co-Principal Investigator on the “Cornerstones: Learning for Living” grant from the Teagle Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities ($250,000, 2020-2024; planning grant $25,000). This initiative introduces transformative texts into gateway courses to reinvigorate humanities studies aligned with students’ majors. Additionally, she teaches courses on literature, film, and cultural production within the Hallmarks program.

Dr. Tulante’s scholarship focuses on post-World War II Italian cultural production and national identity, with a particular emphasis on the novelist Sebastiano Vassalli (1941-2015). Her monograph, Italian Chimeras: Narrating Italy through the Writing of Sebastiano Vassalli (Peter Lang, 2020), explores his contributions and was presented at the Biblioteca Civica Negroni in Novara, Italy, in 2022. Key publications also include “Naples as Heterodoxy: Seventeenth-Century Female Heresies in Sebastiano Vassalli’s Io, Partenope” (NeMLA Italian Studies XLIV, 2023, pp. 174–186); co-editor of “Revisioning / Revisiting Naples in the New Millennium” (NeMLA Italian Studies XLIV, 2023); “A House in Flames: Environmental Ethics in the Work of Sebastiano Vassalli” (Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature, 2016, pp. 79-96); “Milan in Senegal: Immigration and National Identity in the Novels of Pap Khouma” (L’Italia allo specchio, 2015, pp. 297-309); and “High Fashion in Film: Italian Identity and Global Anxiety in Valentino: The Last Emperor and Gomorra” (Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 1.3, 2013, pp. 245–262). Her research extends to Italian fashion and film, and migrant/postcolonial literature in Italian, including works by women authors on diaspora and identity. She held the Wolf Humanities Center Regional Fellowship for the 2021–2022 Forum on Migration, investigating Somali-Italian migration narratives.