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Research Interests

Feminist theories and literatures; feminist and queer narrative theories; multi-ethnic American literary cultures; Italian American / Italian diasporic literary and cultural studies; diaspora/migration/critical race theories.

Biography

Mary Jo Bona is Distinguished SUNY Professor and former chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prof. Bona is also affiliated with the English Department.  Bona’s expertise in feminist literary studies examines the nexus between gender and ethnicity, with transnational migratory identities, material cultures, and Italian diaspora studies as primary intersections. Bona received a stipendiary award and entrance into the Academy of Teacher Scholars at Stony Brook and co-developed with her undergraduate students a course on African American and Italian American women writers. A specialist in the field of multiethnic American literature and feminist studies, her authored books include Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imaginary; By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America; Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers, and a book of poetry, I Stop Waiting For You. Bona is also editor of The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women’s Fiction and co-editor (with Irma Maini) of Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates. Bona is a series editor of Multiethnic Literatures for SUNY Press and serves on the SUNY editorial board. Bona published chapters on the culture and canon debates for the Cambridge volume on American Literature in Transition, on mother/daughters for a volume in the Routledge History of Italian Americans, and on queer daughterhood in La Mamma: Interrogating a National Stereotype for Palgrave.   Bona's monograph, Mother's, Mobility, Narrative: Comparative Studies of Maternality in US Literature, is forthcoming from State University of New York Press.

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