Cristina Lomabardi-Diop

During the 2008-2009 academic year, Cristina Lombardi-Diop will be Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of French and Italian, where she will offer courses on race, immigration, Senegalese transnational culture in Italy, travel between Italy, Africa, and the New World, Italian colonialism and postcolonialism, Futurism, Gender, and Fascism. Professor Lombardi-Diop received a Masters Degree in African and African-American Studies from Yale University (1992) and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University (1999). Between 1999 and 2002 she was Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University and at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Italian Studies Department at the American University of Rome.
Professor Lombardi-Diop’s interests and expertise lie in colonial discourse analysis from a gendered perspective, travel theory and cultural production, and the emergence of first and second generation African-Italian culture as an Italian “postcolonial” phenomenon.
She is the author of numerous essays on Italian colonial and postcolonial literature and culture, and editor of Smuovere il centro (2000) the Italian translation of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, as well as of Gabriella Ghermandi, Regina di perle e fiori. (2007). Her new book, titled Teranga: Ospitalita’, Immigrazione, Cittadinanza will be published by Sinnos in 2009.