Mary Jane Dempsey

Profile

Mary Jane Dempsey is an early career researcher, who has recently completed her PhD in Romance Studies at Cornell University. She was a recipient of the 2021-22 Rome Prize Fellowship in Modern Italian Studies awarded by the American Academy in Rome to conduct the necessary archival work to complete her dissertation. Her 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. Before arriving at Cornell, she completed a BA in History and International Studies at The College of New Jersey and a MSc in History of International Relations at the London School of Economics. As a Visiting Fellow at the ILCS Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, she is preparing a book proposal for her monograph, which traces histories of 20t-h and 21st-century migration to unpack how gendered memories impact constructions of belonging in the Italian context. She will also continue to study migration narratives by conducting preliminary research for a second project, which will investigate cinematic representations of mobility.