Carol Mastrangelo Bové

Carol's Affiliations: Center for African Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies

Carol Mastrangelo Bové was a Teaching Professor in English at Pitt, is a Professor Emerita from Westminster College, PA, and has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. 

Teaching in Pitt’s English department was a great pleasure for her. Education was a significant part of her life, from the fine public elementary school she attended in South Philadelphia--diverse in its student body for the time--to the excellent University of Pennsylvania—especially its programs in language and literature—and beyond. The first person in a working class second-generation Italian American family to attend college, she realized early on that education would be crucial to engagement in the world beyond the domestic lives of the females surrounding her. This realization helped her to see what is at stake for many of her students in developing their potential. She tried to contribute to the department’s high-quality curriculum by bringing opportunities for change and for a satisfying experience like her own to her students at Pitt.

Her book, Kristeva in America: Reimagining the Exceptional, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. Her first book, Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva: Literature, Art, Therapy, came out with SUNY Press in 2006. She has published several articles on Julia Kristeva and on other major figures in world literature and film, for example, Simone De Beauvoir, Jean Renoir, François Truffaut, and Sibilla Aleramo in such periodicals as The Journal of Modern Literature and symplokē. Her publications also include translations and critical editions of psychoanalytic and feminist literary criticism and theory including that of Claude Richard on American classics, Serge Doubrovsky on Proust, and Hélène Cixous on James Joyce. She taught courses in world literature, women’s studies, the short story, and detective fiction.

Her current work includes a book on Colette, “That Most Disturbing of Drives: Colette and the Incest Taboo,” forthcoming with Anthem Press on January 14th, 2025; a review of  Revolution in Poetic Language: Fifty Years Later, forthcoming in symplokē‘s Book Notes section of 33.1/2 (2025); and a new translation of Colette’s La Maison de Claudine.

Carol served as Chair for the Tamara Horowitz Paper Prize for the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program.  She also served on committees including the Literature Assessment Committee and the Literature Awards Committee.