| Beverly Allen, Ph.D. Professor, Italian and Comparative Literature PhD., University of California-Berkeley, 1983 Office: 315 HBC Office Phone: 315.443.5487 E-mail: ballensumm@aol.com |
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Professor Allen earned a B.A. in Music at the University of California at Berkeley,
a M.A. in Italian at Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Italian, with French
minor, at the University of California at Berkeley. She has studied at the Università
degli Studi in Siena, Italy, where she has lived for a total of thirteen years.
The topics of her research and books range from Italian poetry to terrorism
to human rights. Her best-known works are The Language of Beauty’s
Apprentice: The Poetry of Andrea Zanzotto and Rape Warfare: The Hidden
Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Professor Allen wrote Rape
Warfare after visiting survivors and caregivers in Zagreb during the war.
While teaching at the Syracuse University campus in Florence, Italy, and traveling
to the war on a regular basis, Professor Allen was invited to serve as a consultant
to the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
by its first President, The Honorable Antonio Cassese. In 1996, after the U.N.
Security Council changed international law to make rape a Crime against Humanity,
observers inside the U.N. stated that Rape Warfare had influenced that
decision. She continues to visit the region and has completed a second book,
Daring to Trust: Life Lessons from Women after War, with co-author
Susan Schwartz Senstad and Pulitzer-Prize-finalist war photographer Jerome Delay.
This book is currently being reviewed for publication.
Recently, Professor Allen has expanded her writing to include screenplays. At
the request of director Bob Altman, she wrote “His Name Is Daniel,”
a for-TV movie produced in 2001 by Hallmark Entertainment for global distribution.
Based on true stories, this film provides a fictionalized account of what happened
to thousands of girls and women during the war in Bosnia and suggests the issues
survivors have been faced with since then. Her most recent screenplay, “Lady
Lush,” is a bio-pic about Marty Mann, the first woman in Alcoholics Anonymous,
who founded what is today the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.
Her work changed public discourse so that now it is possible to speak of addiction
as a disease, not as moral depravation, a shift that has saved untold lives.
Professor Allen’s current interests include expanding the interpretation
of Dante’s Divine Comedy, addressing the global issue of human
trafficking, and creating new courses, including “Genocide and the Humanities,”
which she will offer in the Fall of 2005.
Professor Allen has received many awards and prizes for her scholarly work and
her literary translations from the Italian. Recently, Dana Gioia, Director of
the National Endowment for the Humanities, introduced her as a translator whose
work makes her a poet in her own right.
She has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of
California at Santa Cruz, Stanford University, Cornell University, and the University
of Zagreb. She has been Resident Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University
and the University of Gothenburg, and has been Distinguished Lecturer at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison.
At Syracuse University, she has served as Director of the Humanities Doctoral
Program and as a member of the Dean’s Council. She is currently on the
Board of the Center for European Studies at the Moynihan Institute in the Maxwell
School of Public Policy.
Interests:
Italian, French, comparative literature, cultural studies, feminist theory.