Peter Carravetta

Peter Carravetta is Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. He was Alfonse M. D’Amato Professor in Italian and Italian American Studies from 2008-2018. Before that he was Professor of Italian and European Studies at CUNY/Queens College for 24 years, and member of the Doctoral Faculty in the Comparative Literature Program at the CUNY/Graduate Center. He was Director of the World Studies Program at Queens from 1994 to 1999.

Born in the province of Cosenza, Italy, in 1951, he migrated to the US in 1963. To an early interest in the natural sciences there followed a shift to the humanities; he studied philosophy, and most recently his research is predominantly in the social sciences. He received a BA in English and an MA in Italian from CCNY. Recipient of several scholarships over the years, he studied at the Universities of Bologna and of Chicago before obtaining his PhD in French and Italian from New York University in 1983 with a thesis on “Critical Methods and the Hermeneutic Perspective.” He writes in both English and Italian. He has received two Fulbrights (1991 and 2003), was a Bogliasco Fellow in 2011, and taught as visiting prof at the universities of Rome, Paris, Madrid, St. Petersburg, and at Middlebury College and Columbia University.

He is the author of ten books of critique, including Prefaces to the Diaphora. Rhetorics, Allegory and the Interpretation of Postmodernity (W. Lafayette (IN), Purdue UP 1991); Del postmoderno. Critica e cultura in America all’alba del duemila (Milano, Bompiani 2009); The Elusive Hermes. Method, Discourse, Interpreting (Davies Group Publishing, Aurora, CO, 2012); After Identity (New York, Bordighera, 2017); and Language at the Boundaries. Philosophy, Literature, and the Critique of Culture (New York, Bloomsbury, 2021)

He was the Founding Editor of the journal DIFFERENTIA review of italian thought (9 issues, 1986-1999), the first publication in English dedicated exclusively to contemporary Italian critical thought.

Carravetta is also the author of eight books of poetry, including: delle voci (Anterem, 1980), The Sun and Other Things (Guernica, 1998), L’infinito. Poesie scelte 1972-2012 (Campanotto 2012), the other lives (Guernica 2014).

He has translated from the Italian Martino Oberto’s avant-garde opus Anaphilosophia (Campanotto, 1993), & Gianni Vattimo & Pier Aldo Rovatti’s, Weak Thought (SUNY Press, 2012).

He has authored over eighty articles and read over 150 papers in a variety of contexts, and on topics ranging from Methods and Theories of Interpretation to Colonialism and Migration, the Avant-gardes, Italian American culture, Postmodernism, Humanism, relationship between Philosophy and History, and aspects of XIX and XX Century American, Italian and French cultures.

Carravetta has long running interests in the visual arts, painting, technology, Alfa Romeos and soccer. He has two adult children. He is working on a memoir.