Office: Watkins Hall 2128
Phone: (951) 827-7859
Fax: (951) 827-6386

marguerite.waller@ucr.edu

MARGUERITE WALLER
Professor, Italian/Comparative Literature
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale University, 1978

Marguerite Waller joined the UCR faculty in l990 after serving for 17 years in the departments of English and Women’s Studies at Amherst College. Her interests include film and visual culture, Renaissance comparative literature, transnational feminism, and globalization. She is the author of Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History (U of Massachusetts P, l980) and articles on Dante, Petrarch, Wyatt, Surrey, Shakespeare, Italian directors Rossellini, Fellini, Wertmuller, Cavani, and Nichetti, East/Central European film since l989, border art and theory, new media, and transnational feminist dialogue. She has co-edited three anthologies: Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance, with Jennifer Rycenga (Routledge, 2001); Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives, with Frank Burke ( University of Toronto Press, 2002); and Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization, with Sylvia Marcos (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Her teaching interests include feminist discourses, feminist science fiction, film studies, Dante, and Renaissance literature.

Professor Waller has held three Fulbright grants, to Italy, to France, and, most recently, Hungary. In the early nineties, she was a member of the women’s art-making collective Las Comadres, active in the San Diego/Tijuana border region. At U.C. Riverside, she has co-organized two major international conferences, “Frontline Femininsms: Women, War, and Resistance (January 1997), and “Sexualities and Knowledges” (February 2002). For the past three years she has participated in a Ford Foundation project, editing a volume on women’s resistance to the erosion of basic economic and civil rights in the global North and South.

Professor Waller’s current research interests include the relationship between sexuality and knowledge in Dante’s Commedia, and the response of selected filmmakers to corporate globalization. Her article on Hungarian filmmaker Ibolya Fekete is forthcoming in a Routledge anthology, East and Central European Cinemas in NewPerspectives, edited by Aniko Imre. In a chapter in her co-edited volume Dialogue and Difference, due in March, 2005, she addresses problems in communication between “ First World” feminisms and other women’s antiglobalization initiatives around the world. A related essay on feminist epistemology will appear in College Literature in April 2005.