Maria Cristina Mauceri’s career began at the Universities of Salerno and Genova, where she worked in the area of German Studies. When she arrived in Australia in 1983, her focus shifted to Italian Studies.
Dr Mauceri’s PhD at the University of Sydney was a comparative analysis of the image of the double, represented by means of the mirror and the shadow, in German Romanticism and in the narrative works of Pirandello. During her Ph D studies, she developed an interest in the history of literary themes. As a result of her interest in literary themes, she was invited to contribute to the
Dizionario dei Temi Letterari edited by R. Ceserani, M. Dominichelli and P.Fasano and published by UTET in 2007 (Torino).
Dr Mauceri’s current research field is the work of migrant writers in Italy. She is particularly interested in them and their works because of her own transnational existence: “As a person living between two countries and two cultures, I became interested in a very new research field: Italophone migrant literature. One of the side effects of Italy’s recent transformation into a country of immigration has been the publication of literary texts by migrant writers coming from European and non European countries. I find this research field very exciting, because I can follow a literary phenomenon from its birth through its continuous development, and beside this my research and my interviews help to make these writers known.” Recently Dr Mauceri was involved in a project coordinated by Armando Gnisci of the Università di Roma La Sapienza,
Nuovo Planetario Italiano. Guida alla letteratura della migrazione [New Italian Planetarium: Guide to the Literature of Migration] published at the end of 2006. The project maps all the migrant writers publishing in Italian in Italy. Dr Mauceri wrote one of the two introductory chapters, “Scrivere ovunque diaspore europee e migrazione planetaria”, as well as the chapter “L’Europa venuta dall’Europa”.
Last year she collaborated with Camilla Bettoni of the Università di Verona on “L’italiano nel mondo” a project coordinated by Serianni of the Università di Roma La Sapienza to be published by UTET (Torino). She is co-author of a chapter in the first volume on the influence of Italy and of the Italian language on Australian culture.
Most of Dr Mauceri’s most recent conference papers reflect her interest in migrant writers in Italy: in March 2005 she presented a paper "Andare e non tornare: i finali in alcuni romanzi di autori migranti italofoni", at the conference "Il dispatrio e i confini letterari" at the Università di Roma "La Sapienza", in September 2006 the paper "Generazioni e genere nei romanzi di tre scrittori migranti albanesi", at the "XIX Conference AISLLI, Civiltà italiana e geografie d’Europa" at the Università di Trieste and in April 2007 the paper "Migrant writing in Italy: geographical and metaphorical boundar at the ACIS conference "New Europe, New Governance, New Worlds?" at Monash University in Melbourne.
In teaching, Dr Mauceri has designed and introduced several units for her students, mostly related to contemporary Italy. In “Representations of the South” students consider literary and cinematic representations of the mafia, while in “Fiction of Youth”, the focus is the theme of youth in contemporary Italian writing. Next year she will co-teach a postgraduate unit of study “Cinema and Literature in Contemporary Italy”. Dr Mauceri has prepared websites and extra material as learning tools. With a colleague she also devised the historical and cultural component of the first year course “Introduction to Italian Studies”.
Dr Mauceri has been a member of the Selection Committee for the Dante Alighieri Literary Prize since 2005.
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