Marie Orton

Marie Orton completed her B.A. degree in Humanities at BYU, and her M.A. and PhD at the University of Chicago in Italian Language and Literature. Before joining the BYU faculty this year, she taught at Duke University, and Truman State University.
One area of her research deals with inscriptions of violence in autobiographical writings, and she has published multiple articles on Italian survivors of the Shoah, and members of the terrorist organization, the Brigate Rosse.
However, her major area of research focuses on the cultural ramifications of migration into Italy during the past two decades, particularly the use of humor by migrant authors to subvert negative social stereotypes about migration. She has published an anthology of writings by seventeen migrant authors, Multicultural Literature in Contemporary Italy, co-edited with Graziella Parati, and translated Alessandro Dal Lago’s study Non-Persons: The Exclusion of Migrants in a Global Society. Her chapter for International Migration Literature through the University of Vienna, as well as her translation of Edmondo DeAmicis’ novel Sull’Oceano are forthcoming in January, 2017. She is currently editing a pedagogical database for Language Tribe, based in Turin, and writing an article, “Female Voices of Migration,” to be included in a Festschrift in honor of Rebecca West.

Marie’s spouse, Brent, (formerly of the academy) is a full-time artist, and their just-turned- teenage daughter, Corinne, has always had high story value.