Mary Cappello

Professor of English
Affiliated Professor of Women's Studies

Ph.D. State University of New York , Buffalo
M. A. State University of New York , Buffalo
B.A. Dickinson College

Office: 308A Swan Hall
Phone: 401-874-4678
E-Mail: mcapp@uri.edu
Website: http://www.awkwardness.org
Office Hours: Tue and Thur 3:30 - 5:00 pm

As a practitioner of literary non-fiction, Mary Cappello is primarily interested in creating forms of disruptive beauty, figuring memory in a postmodern age, bringing incompatible knowledges into the same space, and working at the borders of literary genres. Her memoir, Night Bloom (Beacon Press) is a multi-genre work that combines oral history, folklore, the bilingual journals of her Italian immigrant grandfather (a shoemaker by trade), dream-work, letters and cultural theory. Cappello followed Night Bloom with an altogether different undertaking, a second manuscript entitled Appearances: Scenes from a Queer Friendship. Composed in a spirit of poetic reverie, and following a tradition of queer portraiture (e.g., Stein, H.D., Plante, Als) and queer theory (especially Foucault and Sedgwick), this experiment in prose attempts to enact the forms, literary and relational, made possible by a friendship between a gay man and a lesbian. Cappello's most recently published book, Awkward : A Detour (Bellevue Literary Press), a Los Angeles Times Bestseller, is a book-length essay on "awkwardness" that ranges across subjects and conditions as diverse as ontological discomfort and situational silence, immigration and stuttering, the life and work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Emily Dickinson and Henry James, "tact" and its etymological association with "touch," as well as the letters that her Italian grandfather wrote to her but never sent her when she was a child.

Currently, Cappello is hard at work on two books in progress: Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Aspiration and Extraction in the Age of Chevalier Jackson (forthcoming from The New Press) and ‘Rituals in Transfigured Time’: A Breast Cancer Anti-Chronicle, the first part of which will appear in an upcoming issue of The Georgia Review.

Cappello’s  literary non-fiction and experimental prose appears in such places as Salmagundi, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, American Letters and Commentary, Interim, Western Humanities Review, Raritan, Quarterly West, HLFQ, and numerous anthologies.

In recent years, she was honored with a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at The Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, Russia; The Lange-Taylor Prize from Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies (with photographer Paola Ferrario) to document the lives of new immigrants to Italy; and The Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative for her essay, "Can Creative Writing Be Taught?" In 2005, her essay, “Conjuring,” was cited as a Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays 2005, edited by Susan Orlean with Series Editor Robert Atwan.

Cappello's scholarly research has focused on nineteenth century American literature and culture with an emphasis on nationalism and heteronormativity, plague discourse and the early American novel, illness and authorship, radical poetries and bodily bounds.

Earlier in her career, she was honored with The Richard Beale Davis Prize for the best essay published in Early American Literature, the D.B. Shaw Lectureship in American Studies at Dickinson College, NEH summer support, the Teacher of the Year Award at the University of Rochester, the Excellence in Teaching Award at SUNY/Buffalo, and she has been nominated on multiple occasions for the URI Teaching Excellence Award.

Cappello has published articles on visual and literary culture (Eakins and Alice Barber Stephens; Demuth and James), Alcott's Hospital Sketches, Poe, Hawthorne, Alice James, and Thomas Shepard; interviewed Italian filmmaker Roberta Torre for Quarterly Review of Film and Video; edited a Special Issue of ATQ: A Journal of Nineteenth Century American Literature and Culture, "Women In/Visibility"; written book reviews for Womens Review of Books, and Radical Teacher.

Recent courses offered by Cappello include: Antebellum US Lit: Literary Acoustics; Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein; Immigrant Subjectivity and Documentary Discourse; Charles Chesnutt and James Baldwin; The Contemporary Memoir in Theory and Practice; Literature and Medicine: An Ethics of Care; Creative Writing — Poetry and Literary Nonfiction