Professor Emeritus
Educational Background
PhD, Stony Brook University, 1989
BA, Long Island University, 1978
Interests and Specializations
Sport literature; film; African-American and 18th-century British literature
About
Michele Schiavone, a native of Brooklyn, New York, came to Marshall University in 1989. She has taught courses in 18th century British literature, multi-cultural biography, the short story, African American literature and, most notably, sport literature, a course she developed. She has team-taught an Honors class in Boxing literature and film and taught several Special Topics classes in baseball literature. Teaching Good Films for the first time in Fall 2015, Dr. Schiavone is happy to see the growth of the Film Studies minor.
Her research interests include baseball and boxing literature. Dr. Schiavone has presented many papers at PCA (Popular Culture Association) and SLA (Sport Literature Association) conferences, as well as writing several book reviews for Sport History and Aethlon: the Journal of Sport Literature. Most of her presentations have dealt with African-American athletes in fiction, autobiography, and folklore. Her most recent SLA paper dealt with Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion.
A member of Aethlon’s editorial board, she also served as co-editor of the Sport and Recreation section of the Encyclopedia of Appalachia. Her article “The Presence of John Tunis in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” published by Aethlon in 2005, was recently included in an Aethlon teaching anthology.
Dr. Schiavone’s other interests include learning Spanish and Italian, travel, and choral singing.