AngelaBelli
Professor of English
St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Queens Campus, St. John Hall, Rm. 6 B40
(718) 990-5601
bellia@stjohns.edu
Angela Belli received a B.A. in English, Magna Cum Laude, at
Brooklyn College, CUNY, with highest honors in English for which
she was awarded the English prize at Commencement. She
received an M.A. in English at the University of Connecticut and a
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at New York University.
Her forthcoming book is called, Primary Care: More Poems by
Physicians (Iowa UP).
Prior to coming to St. John’s she taught at the University of
Connecticut and at Brooklyn College. At St. John’s she has
received student and faculty merit awards for her teaching and her
scholarship. Her research has been in the dual areas of
Modern Drama and Literature and Medicine.
Her contributions to the work of learned societies have included
the presentation of many papers at meetings and the organization of
individual panels as well as entire conferences. She organized and
directed a two-hour workshop for the National Association of Poetry
Therapy conference in Charleston in May, 1999. The topic was
“At the Crossroads of the Humanities and Healing: How Written,
Spoken, and Performed Words Enrich the Human Story and Spirit. Two
of her papers--“The Heirs to William Carlos Williams” and
“Psychological Perspectives in the Dramas of Luigi Pirandello”—were
presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association
in Washington, D.C. in December 2000. By invitation, she
served as Moderator of the plenary session of the special Modern
Language Association conference on Disability Studies at Emory
University in Atlanta, Ga. in Spring 2004. She participated, by
invitation, in the Literature, Arts and Medicine Speakers Series
and Master Scholar Colloquium at the New York University School of
Medicine in October 2000. The presentation was made to an
audience of physicians and medical students. The topic was
“Cold Eye, Warm Heart: Medicine and Doctor Chekhov.” In
addition, she was invited to deliver several lectures during a
two-day symposium co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Press and
the Carver College of Medicine of the University of Iowa in April
2004. The symposium was entitled “The Healing Scribe.” She met with
medical students, medical faculty and, at a broadcast of the Voice
of Iowa City, with the general public. More recently, in November
2005, she presented a paper “Doctors and Disease: Medical Discourse
in Shakespearean and Contemporary Drama” at Columbia University by
invitation of the Columbia University Seminar in Renaissance
Studies. Her latest invitation is to appear as a guest speaker at
the History of Medicine Seminar of the National Library of Medicine
in Bethesda, Md.
In addition to program appearances, she has organized a number
of conferences, including that of the New York College English
Association held at St. John’s University in the Spring of
1997. The topic was “The Healing Art of Literature.”
Besides many articles that she has written for scholarly
journals, she is the author of Ancient Greek Myths and Modern
Drama: A Study in Continuity, published by New York University
Press and has co-edited Blood and Bone: Poems by Physicians,
published by the University of Iowa Press. She has another two
books in press. One is a co-edited collection of more poems
by physician-poets entitled Primary Care: More Poems by Physicians,
to be published by the University of Iowa Press. The other is a
critical anthology of contemporary dramas with the working title
Bodies and Barriers: Dramas of Dis-Ease to be published by The Kent
State University Press.
She serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Poetry
Therapy and the Journal of the Pirandello Society of America.
Angela Belli served as Chair of the English Department at St.
John’s University and as President of the New York College English
Association.