Andy Newton - The Study of Modern Italian Humor and its Cultural and Literary Roots (Fall 2009)

For me, the GLISP program proved to be the perfect coupling of my long-time personal and academic interests. While studying abroad in Italy, I conducted research in Italian satire and comedy, looking specifically at Stefano Benni, a notable Italian writer. Italian had for a long time been an academic interest of mine, but comedy remained little more than a personal interest and hobby. The GLISP allowed me a way to bring my passions together and provided me with ideas for future study.

The work I did in my GLISP has had a pretty significant impact on my life and what I've done over the past several years. Immediately upon leaving Brown, I entered a Master's program in Italian at UCLA, where I focused on satire and comic literature and actually studied a lot of the same authors I did for my GLISP. It helped tremendously to go into that graduate program with a foundational knowledge of literature and criticism to work from.

Currently, I am living in New York, where I work as an editor for Macmillan Learning, which publishes educational materials for college-level courses. I am also a published author, writing predominantly satire and comic fiction (GLISP coming in handy, once again). Last fall, my writing partner and I released our debut novel, From the Campaign Trail or Thereabouts, a picaresque political satire following the 2016 election.