Paula M. Salvio is a professor of education and affiliate professor in Classics, Humanities and Italian Studies in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire. She writes and lectures on the cultural and historical foundations of education with a specialization in psychoanalysis, life-writing, and the impact that marginalization, trauma and war have on women, children and youth in formal and informal educational settings. She explores transitional moments in history and society – reform, wars and revolution and their aftermaths- and how these affect the relations of education, culture and politics. Her books and numerous essays reflect her dedication to interdisciplinary inquiry. They combine research in digital and conventional archives with analyses of visual and literary sources and interviews and engage critically with feminist and post-colonial theories of education. Her work has been supported by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council, The United States Department of Education, The New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, the Verizon Foundation and other fellowships. Along with her numerous articles and book chapters, she is the author of Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance, (SUNY Press, 2007) which was awarded a Critics Choice Award by the American Educational Studies Association. Professor Salvio co-edited (with Gail Boldt) Love’s Return: Psychoanalytic Essays on Childhood, Teaching and Learning (Routledge, 2006). Her book, The Story-Takers: Public Pedagogy and Contemporary Italy’s Non-Violent Resistance Against the Mafia was published in 2017 with the University of Toronto Press. She is also the co-author, with Professors Bronwen Low and Chloe Brushwood-Rose, of Community-based Media Pedagogies: Listening in the Commons, (2016, Routledge Press).
A recipient of the Julius Silberger Fellowship at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the Roland and Charlotte Kimball Faculty Fellowship from the University of New Hampshire Department of Education, the Lindberg Award from the UNH College of Liberal Arts, and a Faculty Scholar in Education, she brings the study of psychoanalysis to education and the public humanities. An active public speaker who also writes for non-academic audiences, she also publishes on cookbooks and food blogs as acts of public pedagogy that play out in hegemonic and counter-cultural ways. She has extensive administrative experience, including program and faculty development, capacity building in middle and high schools, designing shared governance policies and practices in educational settings, and qualitative assessment of academic programs. She enjoys mentoring students and faculty and planning events that generate intellectual synergy.
