Carol Mastrangelo Bové

  • Professor Emerita

Carol Mastrangelo Bové was a Teaching Professor in English at Pitt and 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, 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 forthcoming research includes: an article on Borges’s short stories for José Eduardo González’s collection of essays in the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jorge Luis Borges:  “Borges and Identity Politics,” a translation and critical edition of Colette’s La Maison de Claudine for Oxford University Press, and a book on Colette--“That Most Disturbing of Drives: Colette and the Incest Taboo” for Anthem Press.

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

Representative Publications

Kristeva in America: Re-Imagining the Exceptional.  New York:  Palgrave, 2021 (book on the impact of Julia Kristeva’s work on literature and film in the US). 

Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva: Literature, Art, Therapy, New York:  SUNY Press, 2006 (recommended in a review by J.B. Jones for Choice, June 1, 2006). 

Review of At the Risk of Thinking : An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva by Alice Jardine. Symplokē (2020) 28, 491-500. 

“Translating the Unconscious: Aleramo’s and Delmar’s A Woman.”  Symplokē 27, 1-2 (2019), 139-156. 

“Desire Against Discipline:  Kristeva’s Theory of Poetry” in Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives. Ed. Ranjan Ghosh. New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019. 

Conference Proceedings from the Kristeva Circle Conference, which she was invited to host at the University of Pittsburgh, October 27-28, 2017:  “Forum,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 26, 2 (2018), 1-90.  Includes her introduction on “Kristeva and Race” and essay “Spain and Islam Once More:  Fundamentalism in Sainte Thérèse d’Avila” as well as essays by Julia Kristeva (her translation), Hortense Spillers, Jack Halberstam, William Scott, Frances Restuccia, Elaine Miller, and Benigno Trigo.

Research Interests

translation, psychoanalytic and feminist literary criticism and theory