Elvira Pulitano

Dr. Pulitano’s research and teaching interests include Indigenous and Africana Studies, Caribbean Studies, Literatures of the African Diaspora, theories of race and ethnicity, migration, diaspora, and human rights discourse. She joined the ethnic studies department at Cal Poly in fall 2006. A Fulbright scholar from Italy, Dr. Pulitano holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of New Mexico where she specialized in Native American literatures and postcolonial studies. Prior to her appointment at Cal Poly, she taught postcolonial literatures and theory at the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne, in Switzerland.

Dr. Pulitano’s most recent scholarship includes an edited volume titled Indigenous Rights in the Age of the UN Declaration, forthcoming in June 2012 with Cambridge University Press, and a monograph titled “Not from Here: Transnational Narratives from the Caribbean. Writing Diaspora, Telling Lives, currently under review. She is the author of Toward a Native American Critical Theory (The University of Nebraska Press, 2003) and has published essays on the work of Caribbean-born writers Caryl Phillips, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, and V.S. Naipaul as well as various chapters on contemporary Native North American literatures.  She is also the editor of Transatlantic Voices: Interpretations of Native North American Literatures (The University of Nebraska Press, 2007).