PERDIGAO, Lisa

Lisa PERDIGAO}

Contact Information

Associate Professor
Humanities and Communication
College of Psychology and Liberal Arts
Crawford Tower, 626
Phone: 8370
Email: lperdiga@fit.edu

Web & Social Networking

College of Psychology and Liberal Arts

Humanities and Communication

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Research & Project Interests

Dr. Perdigao’s research focuses on the ways in which the representation of death changes in 20th century American literature, poetry and fiction.

She examines modern and postmodern works and their strategies for representing the body through the tropes of entombment and exhumation. Dr. Perdigao explores how the tension between the materiality of the body and the discursivity of language becomes increasingly important to a twentieth-century culture and literature, how the relationships between identity, language, and meaning are tested and problematized both in literature and in theory.

Keywords

20th-Century American Literature
Poetry
Representation of Death
Adolescent Literature
Cultural Studies

Associate Professor
Humanities and Communication, College of Psychology and Liberal Arts

Educational Background

B.A. Boston College 1997
M.A. Boston College 1999
Ph.D. Northeastern University 2004

Professional Experience

Dr. Perdigao has taught at Boston College, Northeastern University, and Merrimack College. She has taught courses in American literature, children’s and adolescent literature, cultural studies, literary theory, as well as a range of composition courses. She received the Kerry Bruce Clark Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2008 and the Phi Eta Sigma National Honor Society Excellence in Teaching Award in 2005.

Current Research

A poetics of recovery in contemporary poetry.

The struggle with language and identity in adolescent literature.

The "zombification" of canonical texts.

Identity politics in the Whedonverses.

Florida culture in television, film, and literature.

 

Selected Publications

From Modernist Entombment to Postmodernist Exhumation: Dead Bodies in Twentieth-Century American Fiction. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010.

Death in American Texts and Performances: Corpses, Ghosts, and the Reanimated Dead, ed. Lisa K. Perdigao and Mark Pizzato. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010.

"Re-membering Beloved." The Fiction and Prose of Toni Morrison: Teaching Race, Culture, and Identity, ed. Jami Carlacio. Urbana: NCTE, 2007. 117-124.

"'the words I'd found': The Politics and Poetics of Recovery in Adrienne Rich's Poetry." Catch if you can your country's moment: Recovery and Regeneration in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich, ed. William Waddell. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 141-157.

"'I got over': Memory, Mourning, and Aesthetics in Erna Brodber's Louisiana." Come Weep With Me: Loss and Mourning in the Writings of Caribbean Women Writers, ed. Joyce C. Harte. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 74-91.

"'Something He Could Keep': The Politics of Change in Postmodern Adolescent Literature." To See the Wizard: Politics and the Literature of Childhood, ed. Laurie Ousley. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 109-127.

Review of Anissa Janine Wardi's Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature. Studies in American Fiction 32.2 (2004).

"'It aint balanced right': Repositioning the Body in/of As I Lay Dying." Approaches to Teaching William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, ed. Patrick O'Donnell and Lynda Zwinger. (MLA, forthcoming).