Olga Ragusa

Olga Ragusa was an eminent Italian studies scholar, born in Catania, Sicily, in 1922 to publisher Andrea Ragusa and Anna Borchardt Weiskopf; she immigrated to New York in 1931, earned her B.A. from Hunter College in 1943 and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1954, and became the Da Ponte Professor Emeritus of Italian at Columbia, chairing the department from 1963 to 1992. She edited the journal Italica from 1968 to 1984 and authored influential works on Italian authors including Manzoni, Verga, Pirandello, Calvino, and others, shaping American scholarship on modern Italian literature. Ragusa passed away in Manhattan on January 2, 2018.