Speaker: John Champagne, Program Chair of Global Languages and Cultures and Professor of English at Penn State Behrend; 2018-2019 Penn State Laureate

Topic: Art and Politics: The Case of Fascist Italy

Date: October 12, 2018

Venue: Nittany Lion Inn

John Champagne is Professor of English and Program Chair of Global Languages and Cultures at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he wrote his first novel, The Blue Lady’s Hands (Lyle Stuart, 1988), while an undergraduate at Hunter College in New York City. At the time, he supported himself playing the piano for cabaret singers and ballet classes and working in wholesale gifts. His second novel, When the Parrot Boy Sings (Meadowlands), was published two years later. Completing a Master’s degree in Film Studies at New York University in 1988, he received his Ph D in English from the University of Pittsburgh in 1993. That same year, he began working at Penn State Behrend. The author of three other books – The Ethics of Marginality, a New Approach to Gay Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy (Routledge 2013), and Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama (Palgrave 2015), he is currently at work on a study of Italian artists of the fascist years. Champagne teaches courses in literature, film, philosophy, Composition, and Italian culture. In 2007-2008, he was awarded a Fulbright Teaching award to the University of La Manouba in Tunisia, where he taught ethnic American literature and media theory. He and his husband divide their time between Erie and their apartment in Perugia, Italy. 

For more on his upcoming talk: https://psu.app.box.com/s/3ll4beuwwyya42sewowov34v046qzk26