English Department

Carlo Rotella

english department

Carlo Rotella

Professor of English

B.A., Wesleyan University                             
Ph.D., Yale University

Carney Hall 451
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467

Phone: 617-552-3191
Fax: 617-552-4220
Email: rotellca@bc.edu

Academic Profile

Specializes in American Studies, urban literature and culture, American literature, and creative nonfiction writing.

Courses

  • EN172.01 - The City in Literature and Film
  • EN277.01 - Introduction to American Studies
  • EN550.01 - Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing for Magazines
  • EN746.01 - The City in American Literature and Culture 

Additional Professional Information

Professor Rotella is Director of the American Studies Program. He has held Guggenheim, Howard, and Du Bois fellowships and received the Whiting Writers Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, and The American Scholar's prizes for Best Essay and Best Work by a Younger Writer, and Cut Time was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2006 he gave lectures in Bosnia and Herzegovina on a U.S. Speaker and Specialist Grant from the State Department. He is an editor of the "Chicago Visions and Revisions" series at the University of Chicago Press. He writes for the New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post Magazine, and his work has also appeared in Critical Inquiry, American Quarterly, The American Scholar, Raritan, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, Transition, Harper's, DoubleTake, Boston, Slate, The Believer, TriQuarterly, Yale Alumni Magazine, and The Best American Essays.

Publications (Selected)

  • Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).
  • Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt (University of California Press, 2002).
  • October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (University of California Press, 1998).
  • "Praying for Stones Like This: The Godfather Trilogy," Catholics in the Movies, ed. Colleen McDannell (Oxford University Press, 2007): 227-252.
  • "Pulp History," Raritan 27.1 (Summer 2007): 11-36.
  • "Shannon Briggs Says Nyet," New York Times Magazine (April 15, 2007): 36-39.
  • "The Two Jameses," The Believer (April, 2007): 49-54.
  • "The Elements of Providence," Washington Post Magazine (September 17, 2006):  24-28, 51-53.
  • "The Kingdom and the Power," Boston (August 2006): 69-84.