Cristina Bacchilega

Cristina Bacchilega is a feminist SF scholar, focusing on fairy tales and fantasy.

Biography: "Cristina Bacchilega is a Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She received her PhD from the State University of New York at Binghamton and her BA from La Sapienza, Università degli Studi di Roma. She grew up in Italy in a bicultural, bilingual family (her mother was Anglo Indian, her father Italian), and she has lived and worked in Hawai‘i since 1983.

Bacchilega’s book, Legendary Hawai‘i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism, was awarded the 2007 Chicago Folklore Prize. The author of Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997) and co-editor with Danielle Roemer of Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale (2001), she has published on Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, Robert Coover, Nalo Hopkinson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Dacia Maraini, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, and fairy tales in Hawaiʻi. Her scholarly interests include fairy-tale studies, folklore and literature, gender and fairy tales, translation studies, narratology, feminist theory and literature, folkloristics and colonialism, Hawaiian mo‘olelo in translation. With historian Noelani Arista and translator Sahoa Fukushima, she has studied nineteenth-century translations of The Arabian Nights into Hawaiian (2007). For her recent essays, see Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale (2008) and Fairy Tale Film and Cinematic Folklore: Visions of Ambiguity (co-authored with John Rieder, 2009). A Guggenheim Fellow (2001) and Folklore Fellow (2007), Bacchilega is review editor for Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, editorial board member for Foklore (UK), and Vice-President for North America of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research. Her current project focuses on the poetics and politics of 21st-century fairy-tale adaptations, and she continues to research the publication of Hawaiian mo‘olelo as English-language “legends” and the translation into Hawaiian of world folklore and literature. She runs a course on Oral Traditions, Folklore, and Cultural Studies"