Fabrizio Ciccone

Biographical Statement

I am a teacher and scholar of modern and contemporary literature. I began my career intending to pursue a specialization in British and Irish literature. More recently, my research has increasingly focused on American literature and culture, with a special emphasis on popular cinema. Prior to my arrival at NMSU, I taught literature, film, and composition at Brown University, Simmons University, the University of Texas at Austin, Boston College, and the University of Texas at Dallas. My teaching draws on the full range of my past and present research, which includes not only modern American literature and culture (c. 1850 to the present) but also the history of the novel, comedy, television, and British and Irish modernisms (especially the works of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett). Many of my teaching and research interests intersect in my current book project, which argues for the political utility of comedy in times of great disaster. I am in the process of developing an on-campus reading group dedicated to the reading of long books—interested students are encouraged to reach out to me about this initiative.

 

Education

Ph.D. in English, Brown University
M.A. in English, Boston College
B.A. in Literature, Sarah Lawrence College

 

Teaching Emphases and Research Interests

Comedy and Satire
History and Theory of the Novel
Intellectual History of Catastrophe
American, British, and Irish Modernisms
Classical Hollywood
Film and Television Studies
Philosophy and Literature

 

Courses Recently Taught and Upcoming

ENGL 469: American Tragedians: Melville, Faulkner, Morrison
ENGL 326: Evil Cinema: The Horror Film in Context
ENGL 303: Film, Media, and Culture: How Film Thinks
ENGL 2620G: American Literature Survey II: Achieving Our Country?
ENGL 2520G: Film as Literature: Classical Hollywood in a Global Frame

 

Courses In Development

Comedy and Cruelty
Perverse Cinema: Hitchcock, Kubrick, De Palma, Lynch
Reading Invisible Man
Gravity’s Rainbow and Other Moral Histories
Television as Equipment for Living

 

Selected Publications

“The Comedian as Regicide: Frank Capra, Boots Riley, and the Betrayal of Satire” (in-progress)
“Achieving Our Country?: William Gaddis, Paul Beatty, and Moral Perfectionism” (forthcoming)
“Pariah Humor: Ernst Lubitsch’s Refugee Comedies.” The Historical Films of Ernst Lubitsch, edited by David John Boyd, Edinburgh University Press, 2025.

 

Contact Information

fciccone@nmsu.edu