Profile for Louise Zamparutti
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Louise Zamparutti
Associate Professor
English
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Louise Zamparutti
Associate Professor
English
Specialty area(s)
Memorials, monuments, borderland identity, Italy & ex-Yugoslavia in World War II.
Brief biography
Louise Zamparutti's research focuses on the ways memorial artifacts contribute to the rhetorical construction of national, political, and cultural identity. Her book Monument in Motu: the Positionality of Place, is in production with Bloomsbury Press with expected publication in fall 2026. Her articles have been published in Research in Social Change, Rhetoric Review, Romance Studies, Human Remains and Violence, and other international journals across disciplines. She has contributed to the edited volumes A Century of Italian War Narratives (Brill, 2023) and Covid Communications: Exploring Pandemic Discourse (Springer, 2023), and she is the author of the stage play Identità/Identiteta, first produced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Spring 2026 she was a UW Fellow at UW-Madison's Institute for Research in the Humanities, and has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency, the American Association for Italian Studies, and the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Slovenian Arts Council. She speaks Italian and French and is studying Slovene. An interview with Dr. Zamparutti about how her dance training influences her research can be found here.
Current courses at UWL
ENG 307: Workplace Writing
ENG 308: Technical Writing
ENG 314: Grant Writing
Education
PhD., UW-Milwaukee
B.A., Hampshire College
Career
Teaching history
ENG 497: Seminar in Writing and Rhetoric Studies
Health Science Writing (UW Milwaukee)
Technical Writing (UW Milwaukee)
Business Writing (UW Milwaukee)
Professional history
Prior to earning her Ph.D. in English at UW-Milwaukee, Dr. Zamparutti was a dancer and choreographer, performing and showcasing original works in Seattle, New York, Italy, and Germany. She was the Health and Wellness Director for the Seattle YMCA and also worked as a freelance translator (Italian-English) and editor for manuscripts translated from Italian and Slovenian. These professional experiences inform her teaching and research.
Research and publishing
Book Chapters
Zamparutti, L. (2023). The Foibe War Narrative: The New Antiheroes of the Second Republic. In A Century of Italian War Narratives. Brill.
Zamparutti, L. (2023). Self-Isolation and Consubstantiality: COVID-19 Terminology and Collective Identity. In COVID Communication: Exploring Pandemic Discourse. Springer.
Selected Journal Articles and Conference Proceedings
Steiner, L., McCracken, C., Kopp, B, & Zamparutti, L. (2024). "Rhetorical prompt engineering." TextGenEd: Continuing Experiments in Teaching with Text Generation Technologies. WAC Clearinghouse.
Zamparutti, L. (2022). The ‘Antenarrative’ in Asynchronous Online Technical Communication Courses: A Social Justice Approach to Teaching. IEEE International Professional Communication Conference Proceedings. 392-396. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9881525.
Zamparutti, L. (2019). The Basovizza Monument: Constructing Memory and Identity. Research in Social Change. 11:3, 25-38. https://doi.org/10.2478/rsc-2019-0013.
Zamparutti, L. (2018). Plato, Mary Baker Eddy, and Kenneth Burke: Can We Talk About Substance? Rhetoric Review, 37:2, 199-211. 10.1080/07350198.2018.1424479.
Zamparutti, L. (2017). Brava Gente and the Counter (Re)public of Italy: Constructing the Foibe as a National Symbol. Romance Studies, 35:1, 12-30. 10.1080/02639904.2017.1299913.
DeVasto, D., Graham, S.S., & Zamparutti, L. (2017). Stasis and Matters of Concern: The Conviction of the L’Aquila Seven. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 30:2, 131-164. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651915620364.
Zamparutti, L. (2015). Foibe Literature: Documentation or Victimhood Narrative? Human Remains and Violence, 1:1, 75–91. Manchester University Press. https://doi.org/10.7227/HRV.1.1.6.
Kudos
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