Alexandra Coller

E-mail Address: alex.coller@lehman.cuny.edu 
Phone Number: 718-960-8921
Office: Carman Hall, Room 277 
Rank: Professor

Education

• B.A., Hunter College, City University of New York
• M.A., New York University
• Ph.D., New York University
  
  

Biography

Alexandra Coller received her B.A. in Romance Languages (French and Italian) from Hunter College (CUNY) and her doctoral degree from New York University. While at NYU, she offered courses on Dante, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne for the Department of Italian Studies and for the Medieval and Renaissance Center. After teaching as a graduate student at Columbia and NYU, Prof. Coller has held visiting posts at SUNY-Stony Brook in the Department of Comparative and Literary Studies, at Dickinson College in the Department of French and Italian, and at Fairfield University in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. She joined Lehman College in August 2010 as an Assistant Professor where she currently teaches courses in Italian language, literature, and culture and sometimes contributes to Lehman’s core curriculum and comparative literature program. She has served as the head of the Italian Program since 2015 and is the faculty advisor for the Italian Club; in addition, she organizes and presents the Italian Film Series in an effort to ensure that the Italian program forms an integral part of campus life. She has served as a member of the College’s Arts and Humanities Curriculum Committee for several years and continues to serve as a member of the Arts Committee. Prof. Coller is Lehman College’s liaison at various cultural institutes around the metropolitan area: The Calandra Institute, NYU’s Casa Italiana, Columbia University’s Italian Academy, and the Italian Cultural Institute.

Professor Coller’s publications on women, gender, drama, early opera, Renaissance books of conduct, and Renaissance tragedy have appeared in The Italianist, Italian Studies, Italian Quarterly, Modern Language Notes, California Italian Studies, and Italica. Her first book, Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy was published in 2017 (Routledge). Prof. Coller is the editor and translator of two volumes of Italian women’s pastoral drama from the early seventeenth-century for The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series. The first volume, Valeria Miani’s Amorous Hope, A Pastoral Play is coming out this Fall (Toronto: University of Toronto, ITER, 2020), while the second, on Isabetta Coreglia’s La Dori, is forthcoming in 2021. Prof. Coller is currently at work on her fourth book-length project, Women and Letterati in Italian Dialogues and Treatises of the Late Renaissance (forthcoming, 2023). Together with her colleague, Prof. Amin Erfani (French), Prof. Coller is organizing an international conference at the CUNY Graduate Center entitled “Open Borders: Translation and its Perils” (Fall, 2021).