Mary Jane Dempsey

Lecturer, Italian Studies

Education:

B.A., The College of New Jersey
M.Sc., London School of Economics
M.A., Cornell University
Ph.D., Cornell University

Contact Information:

Office: Humanities Building 2116

Mary Jane Dempsey is a Lecturer in Italian Studies. Her teaching areas and research include migration histories, Italian literature and cinema, critical race theory, and feminist and memory studies, which she incorporates in her language, literature, and culture classes at Stony Brook.

Dr. Dempsey’s research has been funded by Cornell’s Institute for European Studies, Society for the Humanities, Institute for Comparative Modernities, Brettschneider Exchange at the University of Oxford, and Trinity College’s Research Grant in Modern Italian History. Additionally, she was a recipient of the 2021-2022 Rome Prize Fellowship in Modern Italian Studies awarded by the American Academy in Rome. Before Dr. Dempsey arrived at Stony Brook in 2024, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study Cultural Memory at the University of London, where she prepared her book proposal for her first monograph, which traces histories of 20th and 21st century migration to unpack how gendered memories impact constructions of belonging in the Italian context.