Chiara Cillerai, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Writing, Institute for Core Studies
First-Year Writing Program, Institute for Writing Studies
B.A. and M.A., The University of Florence, Italy, 1992
Ph.D., Rutgers University, 2007
cillerac@stjohns.edu
My scholarship is in Early American literature and culture, and
my book project explores the connection between the rhetoric of
cosmopolitanism and literary genres and how this is also reflected
in the language that defines what America is. I recently completed
an essay on the role of correspondence in late eighteenth-century
American culture which will be published in Correspondences:
Essays on the History, Theory, and Practice of U.S. Letters,
1770-1860 (Ashgate, forthcoming 2009).
What drew me to study the complexities, the richness and the
contradictions of early American literary culture are the
similarities with what this culture has become today. What I
consider the most rewarding part of my research is the hands-on
type of work I do in the archives as well as the interdisciplinary
character of the work. I read and write about poetry, newspapers,
letters, novels, and political pamphlets, to name a few. If variety
and interdisciplinarity are essential components of my research,
they are also essential components of how I teach my students in
the writing courses here at St. John’s. Most of the writing
projects that my students complete entail reading, talking and
writing about a very diverse group of texts in different writing
genres, and they are introduced to writing as an interdisciplinary
task that entails composing as much as it entails conversation and
connective thinking.