Catherine Bloomer is Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in Italian Studies at Villanova University. Previously she was the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Premodern Disability Studies at Brandeis University. Catherine holds a PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where she obtained her M.A. and M.Phil. in Italian literature. She graduated cum laude from Barnard College in 2013, with a B.A. in Italian and English literature and a concentration in Creative Writing. At Barnard, Catherine received the Speranza Prize in Italian and the Lenore Marshall Prize for poetry. As part of her undergraduate career, she studied at the Università di Bologna in 2011. She received her M.F.A. in fiction from the New School in 2016, where she taught literature and worked as a research assistant while writing a critical thesis on women’s voices and, as her creative thesis, a novel that examines the intersections of disability and marginalized cultures. Catherine is the Associate Director of the arts education nonprofit WriteOn NYC.
Catherine’s research interests include disability, the body, and gender. She is also pursuing research in comparative literature and feminist scholarship with special regard to disease and violence. Her book-in-progress, Blameless Defect: A Dantean Model of Disability, focuses on the representation of physical disability in Dante’s works and times.
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