Gabriella Romani, Ph.D.

Director of Alberto Institute & Italian Studies and Professor of Italian
Department of Languages Literatures and Cultures

Gabriella Romani is Professor of Italian at Seton Hall University. She received a Laurea from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and a Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. At Seton Hall she also directs the Charles and Joan Alberto Italian Studies Institute and the Summer Study-Abroad Program in Rome.

She is the author of Postal Culture: Writing and Reading Italy in Post-Unification Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2013), co-editor of Writing to Delight: Italian Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (University of Toronto Press, 2006), The Printed Media in fin-siècle Italy (Legenda, UK, 2011),  The Formation of a National Audience in Italy, 1750-1890: Readers and Spectators of Italian Culture (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2017), Matilde Serao: International Profile, Reception and Networks (Classiques Garnier, 2022). She is currently working on a  monograph on nineteenth-century Jewish writers in Italy, tentatively titled: “Jews of Italy and the Creation of a National Culture in Post-Unification Italy.” She has translated into English the works of Edith Bruck and Enrico Castelnuovo. 

Her main field of research is late Nineteenth-Century Italian Literature and Culture. She is particularly interested in the relationship between author, publisher and reader and in the interaction between high and low-brow cultural productions during the process of modernization of the printed media in the late nineteenth-century Italy. She is one of the founders of Ottocentismi or INNCIS (Interdisciplinary Network of Nineteenth-Century Italian Studies).