Chiara Cillerai, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Writing, Institute for Core Studies
First-Year Writing Program, Institute for Writing Studies
cillerac@stjohns.edu
B.A. and M.A., The University of Florence, Italy, 1992
Ph.D., Rutgers University, 2007
Chiara Cillerai is an assistant professor in the Institute for
Writing Studies at St. John’s University, NY. Her most recent
work is a collection of short essays on the pedagogical challenges
of introducing students to Toni Morrison’s historical fiction A
Mercy. She contributed an essay to the collection entitled
“’One Question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?’
Reading and responding to seventeenth-century texts using Toni
Morrison's historical reconstructions in A Mercy,”
(Early American Literature, 48.1. Forthcoming Spring
2013.) In this essay, Dr. Cillerai explores the challenges and the
success of introducing first year writing students to historical
fiction as a means to write about and re-write historical
interpretations. Her recently completed book manuscript, The
Voices of Cosmopolitanism in Early American Culture, considers
how a number of American writers of the late colonial period
employed the universalizing language of cosmopolitanism to engage
in discussions of nationhood. From this perspective, she
investigates the problematic intersections between elite and
non-elite discourses, between the voices of those who had access to
power and publication and those who had none, between print and
manuscript forms, and between literary genres that emerge within
the works of a diverse group of writers that include Benjamin
Franklin, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Olaudah Equiano, and the
Italian immigrant, Philip Mazzei.