Top of page

Wanda Balzano

Associate Professor, Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Founding Chair, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Contact

  • Office: A113 Tribble Hall
  • Phone: (336) 758-4455
  • Email:

Degrees

  • PhD, University College Dublin (National University of Ireland)
  • MA, University College Dublin (National University of Ireland)
  • MA,  Istituto Universitario Orientale (University of Naples, Italy)
  • BA, Istituto Universitario Orientale (University of Naples, Italy)

Area(s) of Interest

  • Anglo-Irish Studies 
  • Italian American and Italian Diaspora Studies
  • Women’s Literature and Drama
  • Interdisciplinary Perspectives: Translation, Classics, and Cultural Analysis
  • Italian influences in English Literature
  • Intersections of Film, Art, and Gender Studies in Cultural Discourse

Courses taught at WFU

  • FYS 100 – Storytelling, Irish Style
  • ENG 160 – Introduction to British Literature
  • ENG 165 – Studies in British Literature
  • ENG 302 – The Business of Italian-American Writing: Diaspora, Family, and The Art of Border Crossing
  • ENG 302/ 602 – Irish Women in Writing and Film
  • ENG 302/602 – Feminist Leadership: Theory, Literature, and Action
  • ENG 302/602 – Gendered Connections: Italy in the American and British Imagination
  • HON 260 – Rethinking Space, Place, and Gender in the City
  • HMN 385 – Inclusive Public Spaces: Examining the Role of Space, Place, and Gender in Communities [ACE (Academic Community Engagement) designation]
  • ITA 196 – Italian Across the Curriculum
  • MLS 805: Isle of Saints and Sinners: Ireland’s Literature and Culture
  • WGS 101 – Window on Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
  • WGS 150 – Perspectives in Gender and Sexuality
  • WGS 150 – Sorrento and Southern Italy: Broadening Familiar and Feminist Perspectives
  • WGS 200/600 – The Field Guide to Museums
  • WGS 221/622 – Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
  • WGS 221/622 – Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in Italy and the US
  • WGS 318/618 – Film Lab in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
  • WGS 327/627 – The Feminist Book Society
  • WGS 377/677 – Gender and the Foreigner in a Transnational World
  • WGS 396/696 – The Feminist Project in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
  • WGS 398/698 – Theory and Practice of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
  • WGS 399/699 –  Feminist Leadership: Theory, Literature, and Action

Selected Publications

  • “Unveiling the Shared Struggles: Aging, Abandonment, and the Odyssey of Women in Elena Ferrante’s The Day of Abandonment and Euripides’ Medea,” in Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton (eds.), Fiction and Poetry to Help Us Age: Criticism and Reflections by Professors of Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
  • “In Women’s Hands: Remembering the White Art and Maria Orsini Natale’s Mediterranean World,” in Giovanni Spani and Marco Marino (eds.) Women of the Mediterranean: Women and Memory (Lanciano: Rocco Carabba, 2019).
  • “’The World Has Shown Up’: Race, Gender, and Class in the new Ireland of Emer Martin,” in Feminism: Past, Present and Future Perspectives, edited by Josefa Ros Velasco (New York: Nova Science Publishers-Women’s Issues Series, 2017).
  • Writing Exile: Women, the Arts, and Technologies (special issue of Anglistica: An Interdisciplinary Journal, issue 17:, no.1, December 2013) edited with Silvana Carotenuto; 
  • Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture, edited with Anne Mulhall and Moynagh Sullivan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Irish Feminisms (special issue of the Irish Review, No.35, Summer 2007) edited with Moynagh Sullivan.