Thomas J. Ferraro

Professor Ferraro is an aficionado of the great American stuff--Emily Dickinson, Edward Hopper, the Marx Brothers, and Nina Simone--who writes on literature, film, and the performing arts. Contrary by temperament, at least as a scholar-critic, he has just published his *big book*, Transgression & Redemption in American Fiction (Oxford UP, announced for February 2021): a revisionist account of the interplay among violative self-making, transgressive sexuality and redemptive sacrifice that recaptures both the aesthetic wonder and social danger of the classic mainline, from Hawthorne's A Scarlet Letter to masterworks by Chopin, James, Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway. For a preview of the issues in play, see his recent essay, "Transgression and Redemption in the 1930s" in William Solomon, ed., The Cambridge Companion to American Literature of the 1930s (CUP, 2018), 145-161.  Ferraro is also the author of Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (NYU, 2005; winner of a 2006 American Book Award), Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in 20th-Century America (U Chicago, 1993), the editor of Catholic Lives, Contemporary America (Duke, 1997), and a contributor to The Columbia History of the American Novel, Scribner's Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Catholicism in the Movies, and The Catholic Studies Reader.