Nefeli Misuraca was born in Rome where she graduated in Literature at la Sapienza. She studied at Yale University where, after completing a PhD in literature and art, she taught literature and worked as a research assistant in two research centers. At the Yale Child Study Center, she worked on juvenile crime prevention and at the PACE Center she developed courses in art thanks to a federal grant. The daughter of a film director, she has been working as a screenwriter and editor for cinema and television. Many of the films she either edited or collaborated to were featured in major international film festivals (Berlin, Rotterdam, Pesaro). She has been art correspondent for the Cyprus Mail and collaborates with il Manifesto writing on the relationship between television and society. She has been invited to three Ted talks and to other conferences on cinema, art and literature. She has been professor of Anthropology of Art at la Sapienza, of Art History and Cultural Studies at Frederick University (Cyprus) and she now teaches in three American Universities in Rome. She teaches literature at John Cabot and Art at Temple and at Loyola.
Research:
Since she created the course on the History of the World in 50 Images of Women, she has been researching the artistic production on women and by women throughout history. Her main interest revolves around a comparative research in art, literature and anthropology related to the image of the woman in history. She investigates the ways in which cultures have expressed the concepts of femininity in art and literature and in what way the former has influenced the latter (and vice versa). Since she worked at the PACE Center she has developed a teaching philosophy that includes the most recent studies in psychology and pedagogy. She is particularly interested in the studies on different types of intelligence and learning, in order to deliver her classes outside the classic lecture-style, focusing on individual abilities and competencies. She is a translator from and to English and has published with major Italian publishing houses.
Courses taught:
She teaches Composition focusing on the development of each student’s individual writing voice. The course History of the World in 50 Images of Women, originally taught at Temple Rome, has become a literature course at John Cabot with the title 50 Women: The History of Literature. Whereas the former focuses on the cultural and anthropological basis for the construction of the concept of womanhood and femininity (later expressed in art), the latter focuses on the literary works that shaped our modern idea of woman. In all of her courses, she often uses films as a modern vehicle of cultural signification.
