About
Curator of American Dime Novel: Racialization / Erasure and recipient of the WVU Libraries in the Arts Faculty Award, Nancy Caronia is a Teaching Associate Professor with the Department of English. They co-edited Personal Effects: Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo (Fordham University Press 2015; paperback 2019) and wrote the introduction for the U.S. printing of DeSalvo’s Casting Off (2014). Their chapter “Dime Novels and the Creation of the Italian Immigrant Criminal” is forthcoming in American Contact (University of Pennsylvania Press). Caronia received an NEH Summer Institute Fellowship in support of their dime novel book project, and they have been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize for their creative non-fiction work. Most recently, Caronia received a West Virginia Humanities Council Grant for “‘You Are My Best Maid’: Gender and Diasporic Italian Women in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven.” At WVU they have received the Nicholas Evans Faculty Award for Advising Excellence (2019), a Teaching MVP Award: “Queen of Online Instruction” (2020), and the first Honors Excel Mentor Award (2021).
Special thanks to West Virginia University undergraduates Michael DiBacco, Allison Berg, Madeline Miller, and Lily Wright for their assistance in reading and cataloging dime novels through WVU’s Research Apprentice Program (RAP); Sally Brown, Exhibits and Programs Coordinator, WVU Libraries; Stewart Plein, Curator, Rare Books & Printed Resources, WVU Libraries; Matthew Short, Digital Collection and Metadata Librarian, Northern Illinois University’s Nickels and Dimes: From the Collection of Johannsen and LeBlanc digitized dime novel collection; Caitlin Marineau, Assistant Curator, University of Minnesota Libraries; WVU Department of English; Cari Carpenter, WVU Department of English; The NEH Summer Institute: Bard Graduate Center’s American Material Culture: Nineteenth-Century New York where this exhibit was first conceived; and Lily Wright for her design of the American Dime Novel: Racialization / Erasure Omeka site.