Thomas Simpson

Thomas Simpson, Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Italian, Assistant Chair for Italian, Associate Director of the WCAS Drama Major. PhD U. of Chicago. Teaches language and literature/culture courses, has taught on comedy for the Kaplan Humanities Institute and Introduction to Drama in the English Department. Courses for Italian include student-created Futurist Performance and the Teleromanzo course, in which students create and film a parody of an Italian soap opera.

In 2005 he brought Teatro delle Albe to Chicago for a residency and performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and in 2009 brought Marco Baliani to perform his monologue about the Moro assassination,Corpo di stato ("Body of State"). In 2010 Simpson was invited to present a lecture/demonstration on Commedia dell'Arte for the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Recent publications: Murder and Media in the New Rome (Palgrave, 2010); editor and translator, with Nerenberg and Marini-Maio, Marco Baliani's 'Body of State' (FDUP, 2011); contributor to Dramatic Interactions(CSP 2011). Translations: Marco Martinelli, Rumore di acque ('Noise in the Waters"), forthcoming in California Italian Studies; Antonio Fava, The Comic Mask in the Commedia dell'Arte (NU Press, 2007); PP Pasolini, "Manifesto for a New Theatre" and "Affabulazione" (PAJ, Winter 2007); Ermanno Rea, Mystery in Naples (Guernica, 2003).
In 2004 he organized a campus wide teach-in dedicated to the Abu Ghraib scandal.

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