Alessandro Portelli

Alessandro Portelli (born July 8, 1942) is an Italian scholar of American literature and culture, oral historian, writer for the daily newspaper il manifesto, and musicologist. He is a professor of Anglo-American literature at the University of Rome La Sapienza. In the United States he is best known for his oral history work, which has compared workers' accounts of industrial conflicts in Harlan County, Kentucky and Terni, Italy. In 2014-15, he was a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University, co-teaching a course on Bruce Springsteen's America.

Portelli was born in Rome in 1942, and was raised in Terni, an industrial town 65 miles to the north. His father was a civil servant, and his mother was a teacher of English. He spent his senior year of high school as an American Field Service exchange student in the Los Angeles area. He studied at the University of Rome La Sapienza, receiving degrees in law in 1966 and in English in 1972. He began working for the Italian National Research Council in 1962.

Portelli began his academic career at the University of Siena, where he taught American literature from 1974 to 1981. He moved to the faculty of human sciences at the University of Rome La Sapienza to teach American literature in 1981 and has remained there to the present.

A meeting between Portelli and University of Kentucky (UK) sociologist David Walls, facilitated by journalist Beniamino Placido, during a visit by Walls to Rome, Italy in summer 1973 led to them visiting Harlan County together during a trip by Portelli to the United States that fall. Portelli returned as a James Still fellow at the UK Appalachian Center in fall 1983, and began developing his extensive oral history work in Harlan County. He also began a continuing exchange program, involving graduate students and faculty, between the UK Appalachian Center and the University of Rome La Sapienza.

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