Giancarlo Tursi

Department of French and Italian

Specialization

 

 

Education

Prof. Tursi’s work sits at the intersection of literary studies, translation theory, and language politics. By drawing attention to the literary activity of minor or minoritized languages within and across national circumscriptions, he seeks to challenge the pernicious premises of nationalist monolingualism, often bound up with acts of ethnic discrimination. A comparatist by training, I work across the languages I was either raised with or have acquired: Italian, French, and Spanish. I also speak my native Italian dialect of Martinese, a branch of the Neapolitan language family, which allows me to work with a number of other Italian dialects. I have recently started learning the Mayan language of Kaqchikel, a branch of the Mam-Quichean family, spoken by roughly 400,000 people in Central Guatemala.