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Margherita Heyer-Caput
Associate Professor, Italian
Email: mheyercaput@ucdavis.edu |
MARGHERITA HEYER-CAPUT completed her education in Italy (Laurea in Filosofia, 1980, University of Torino) and the United States (Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures, 1993, Harvard University), and taught for several years at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and various universities of the East Coast. Her research and teaching areas cover the Italian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to philosophical approaches to literature, Italian women writers, literature and film, Italian and Italian American Cinema. She is the author of Esistenza e ragione nell'opera di Franz Kafka (1982). Existence and Reason in Franz Kafka's Work) and Per una letteratura della riflessione: elementi filosofico-scientifici nell'opera di Luigi Malerba (1995). For a Literature of Reflection: Philosophical and Scientific Aspects of Luigi Malerba's Work). Her forthcoming book on Italian woman writer and 1926 Nobel laureate, Grazia Deledda, includes a chapter on the relationship between one of Deledda's novels, Cenere (1904. Ashes), and the homonymous silent movie made in 1916 by Italian "diva", Eleonora Duse.
In Film Studies, Professor Heyer-Caput is particularly interested in Italian American Cinema and Italian Cinema. She regularly teaches Film Studies 120, Italian American Cinema. FMS 120 explores representations of Italian American identity in North American cinema. Working from a historical perspective, FMS 120 students analyze both Hollywood films and independently produced cinematic texts of the last one hundred years in order to de-construct stereotypical images of Italian American ethnicity and culture. Thus, a deeper question underlying this course is how American cinema has constructed images of gender, race, religion, and ethnicity in order to dialectically configure a sense of "Americanness." At present, Professor Heyer-Caput is working on a research project that studies the visual metaphors of Italian American cinema in an interdisciplinary perspective.
Professor Heyer-Caput is developing a new Special Topics course on Contemporary Italian Cinema (FMS 189), to be offered in spring 2008. This class will focus on filmic representations of youth, family, and politics and how they reflect and question the multiple changes that Italian society is undergoing in a global world.