Academic History

M.A., Ph.D., Michigan State University
B.A., University of Notre Dame
At St. Thomas since 2002

Expertise/Specialties

African Literatures and Cinema
Postcolonial Literature and Theory
Global Cultural Studies
Third World Cinema

Awards & Honors

2007 Maxi Grant, University of St. Thomas

2004 Sudden Opportunity Grant, University of St. Thomas

2001 Varg-Sullivan Award
Awarded to an outstanding graduate student in the College of Arts and Letters, MSU

Fulbright Research Award
Awarded for dissertation research in Ghana, Oct 1999- Sept 2000

1999 College of Arts and Letters Merit Fellowship, MSU
Awarded for dissertation research, Fall 1999 and Spring 2000

1997-1999 Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship
Awarded for the study of Yoruba

1998 Global Young Scholar Award, MSU
Awarded for pre-dissertation research in Ghana, Summer 1998

Selected Publications

“Contesting Authenticities: African Film Critics and the History of Early Video Production in Ghana.” Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies. 20.1(2008): 21-48.

"Amma Darko's The Housemaid and the Gendering of Novel and Nation." Critical Perspectives on Amma Darko. Ed. Vincent O. Odamtten.  Cape Town: Adelphi, 2007.

"Troubled Men and the Women who Create Havoc: Four Recent Films by West African Filmmakers." Research in African Literatures 34.3 (2003): 159-66.
 
"Restaging the Past: The Rewriting of the Tale of the Beautiful Daughter by Abrahams, Tutuola, Ogali, and Aidoo." African Images: Recent Studies and Text in Cinema. The Annual Selected Papers of the African Literature Association. Eds. Maureen N. Eke, Kenneth W. Harrow, and Emmanuel Yewah. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000.

"A Feminist Reading of Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman."  The Postcolonial Condition of African Literature. The Annual Selected Papers of the African Literature Association. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000.

"Women, Melodrama, and Political Critique: A Feminist Reading of Hostages, Dust to Dust, and True Confessions." Nigerian Video Films.  Ed. Jonathon Haynes.  U of Ohio Press, 1999.

"At an Intersection of Humanism and Postmodernism: A Feminist Reading of Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman."  Research in African Literatures 28.2 (1997): 57-65.

Selected Presentations

"Cosmopolitan Spectacle and Narratives of National Belonging in Three Transnational West African Videos." Paper presented at the African Literature Association Annual Conference, Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL, April 22-27, 2008.

"A New Critical Architecture for African Grassroots Cinemas: Nigerian Video in Ghana, Pirate Economies and Transnational Media Flows."  Paper presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Philadelphia, PA March 6-9, 2007

"Ghanaian Video Goes Global: An Itinerant Cinema of Travel." Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, 2007.

Invited Talk, "African Cinema and Its Criticism," African Studies Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, October 26, 2005.

"Politics and Video Production." African Literature Association's Annual Conference. Madison, Wisconsin. April 14-18, 2004.

"Arab Feminists and African Difference in Fatema Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass." Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association. New York. December 2002.

"Between Art and Ethnography: Looking for New Ways of Reading Popular Video." Annual Conference of the African Studies Association. Washington, DC 2002.

Video Production

The Video Revolution in Ghana (2000)
see clips from the documentary here: http://www.youtube.com/user/cgarritano