Carol Dell'Amico, PHD

BIOGRAPHY

Carol Dell’Amico was born in nearby Lompoc to an Italian American father and a Spanish mother with a deep love for British literature. Before finishing high school, she lived in nine different U.S. cities across five states, as well as in southern Africa, where she spent several formative years. Her childhood and adolescence were further enriched by visits to family in Spain and along the east coast of the U.S.

She completed her final year of high school in La Crescenta, California, and was subsequently admitted to UC Berkeley as a Humanities major. After earning her B.A., and with some experience in videography, she took a position as a trainee editor in video post-production. However, the job only confirmed that her true passion lay in literature. She went on to complete the requirements for a B.A. in English at CSU Los Angeles, then entered their M.A. program, and eventually earned a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University. Her dissertation focused on Jean Rhys (1890–1979), the Anglo-Caribbean, postcolonial writer.

With a book contract for her dissertation in hand (Routledge), Professor Dell’Amico was hired by the English Department at CSU Bakersfield in 2005 as a specialist in Modern British Literature. She also teaches film studies, an interest sparked during her senior year of high school when she lived near a repertory cinema, and later nurtured through her work-study job at UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive, where she assisted archivists, worked in the projection booth, and ushered.

Her teaching career began while she was still in the M.A. program at CSULA, primarily in composition, and continued at Rutgers, where she taught a wide range of courses including feminist theory, composition, and detective fiction. During this time, she contributed numerous entries and essays on British and American authors to various academic reference works. While completing her dissertation in Los Angeles, she taught at CSULA and several community colleges, continuing her scholarly writing.

Her dissertation was reissued in paperback by Routledge in 2010 and later solicited for broader distribution by Lambert Academic Publishing in 2011. She has since published additional work on Jean Rhys, as well as contemporary Irish authors, reflecting her ongoing scholarly engagement with postcolonial and gender/sexuality studies. One article, on Anne Enright, was republished in 2017 (Gale Cengage), and her most recent scholarly contribution, a chapter on John Banville, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2026.

Professor Dell’Amico is an affiliated faculty member in CSUB’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. Her service to the university has included roles such as assessment coordinator for the School of Arts and Humanities and director of the graduate program in English.