Chiara Cillerai

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Professor
Department of Core Studies
St. John's College of Liberal Arts and SciencesUniversity Core

Chiara Cillerai is a Professor of First-Year Writing in the Department of Core Studies and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Communication Studies. Her research focuses on literary history, writing technologies, and early American manuscript publications. She has published on these subjects in academic journals and contributed chapters to edited collections of essays. She is the author of Voices of Cosmopolitanism in Early American Writing and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2017). Her research interests as well as a continued attention to individual and group cultures and their relationship to the contexts that produce them inform her approach to teaching in the first-year composition classroom. Her study of early-American hybrid and multi-modal manuscript publication translates into writing courses focused on the ways students compose, communicate and self-publish today. In her courses, students examine and compose in multimodal digital forms based on media like newsfeeds, video, audio, and print and combine these 21st-century forms of composing into eighteenth century-modeled commonplace books.  

  • Cultures of Food 

  • Food Justice (and its injustices) 

  • Writing and Food 

  • Reading and Writing in the Digital Age 

 

Books

The Voices of Cosmopolitanism in Early American Writings and Culture. Palgrave-McMillan 2017.

Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s Selected Writings, Her Archive and the Stories it Tells, Manuscript in progress of a monograph/scholarly edition of E.G. Fergusson’s commonplace books. (In progress) 

Chapters in Edited Volumes 

 “Cosmopolitan Correspondences: The American Republic of Letters and the Circulation of Enlightenment Thought.” Chapter 22 in Volume I: Origins to 1820 of The Blackwell Companion to American Literature. Wiley-Blackwell, June 2020. 

 “‘A continual and almost exclusive correspondence’: Philip Mazzei’s Transatlantic World of Letters.” Correspondences: Essays on the History, Theory, and Practice of U.S. Letters, 1770-1860, eds. Sharon M. Harris and Theresa Strouth Gaul (Ashgate, 2009) 

Academic Journals 

 “Cosmopolitanism” Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History, Oxford University Press, Summer 2023. 

  “Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s Manuscript Books: Curating a Legacy?” Women’ Studies (September 2021) Women's Studies, 50:6, 2021, pp. 597-612, Special Issue entitled “Early American Women Authors: Unbound,”  

“Scribal Publication of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s Commonplace Books,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 48, 2019, pp. 75-87.  

“Remembering the Past: Toni Morrison’s Seventeenth Century in Today’s Classroom,” forum editor, Early American Literature, 48.1. Spring 2013.  

 “’One Question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?’ Reading and responding to seventeenth-century texts using Toni Morrison's historical reconstructions in A Mercy,” Early American Literature, 48.1. Spring 2013.  

“A Tale of Two Different Archives: Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s Commonplace Books 

Chiara Cillerai (St. John’s University, NY) and Lisa Logan (University of Central Florida), Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, U of Maryland College Park, June 2023. 

 “Good Stars how unequally some things are blended!”: Private/Public Spaces in Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson and Benjamin Rush’s correspondence.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Virtual Meeting, April 9, 2021.  

 “Topical Disease: Rhetorical Representation of Epidemic in Early America” Society of Early Americanists Biennial Virtual Conference, March 3-7, 2021.  

 “Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson’s Manuscript Commonplace Books: Curating a Legacy?” American Literature Association Annual Meeting, Boston, May 2019. 

 “Colloquy with Tita Chico on The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting, Denver, March 2019. 

 “Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson’s Letters.” Society of Early Americanists Biannual Meeting, Eugene, OR, February 2019. 

 “Revolutionary Media and the Media of Revolution.” Workshop participant at Transatlantic Conversations: New and Emerging Approaches to Early American Studies. Mainz, Germany, October 4-6, 2018. 

 “Cosmopolitanism and Nostalgia in Elizabeth Fergusson’s Commonplace Books” NEASEC, Toronto, October 2017.