Giovanna Summerfield

Editor, Italica

2022-2026

Department of World Languages, Literatures and Culture
Auburn University
E-mail: summegi@auburn.edu

Biography:

Giovanna Summerfield is Professor of Italian and French, as well as director of the Mediterranean Studies undergraduate certificate and the Languages Across the Curriculum program at Auburn University, where she has also served for ten years as Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts. She received her PhD in Romance languages and literatures with a Minor in European and Mediterranean history from the University of Florida. During her time at Auburn, she has been recognized with the Creative Research and Scholarship Award (within Fine Arts, Liberal Arts, Architecture & Design, Business, Social and Human Sciences), 2022, the College of Liberal Arts’ Engaged Scholarship, 2009-2012 and the Outstanding Scholarly Achievement in Women’s Studies, 2009-2010. She has also served as an ambassador in the Office of Sustainability’s Peer Network, earning the Spirit of Sustainability Award, 2019.  Summerfield has served as Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholar, dissertation outsider reader, and keynote speaker for several national and international academic institutions, as well as Global Teaching Academy Fellow and Imagining America Research Fellow.

Summerfield has published extensively on French and Italian literature of the long-eighteenth century, comparative literature, women’s studies, film studies, and Mediterranean studies. Among her most recent books are Sicily on Screen. Essays on the Representation of the Island and Its Culture (2020) and Sicily and the Mediterranean: Migration, Exchange, Reinvention (2015). Her works have been published in journals such as Annali d’italianistica, Rivista di studi italiani, L’Avventura, International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes, Cahiers d’études romanes and in many collective volumes. Summerfield is also a published short story writer and poet.

She currently serves as book review editor of Modern Italy, Cambridge University Press, as editor-in-chief of Italica, and as co-founder and co-editor of a new journal on modern and contemporary Mediterranean Studies, I.S. Med, Interdisciplinary Studies on the Mediterranean, Mimesis International.