Starting in the Fall of 2022, Professor Rushing will be Professor of European Languages & Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He teaches, researches and publishes on 20th- and 21st-century Italian literature, culture and film, including contemporary Italian fiction, film and television; critical and interpretive theory (especially gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, biopolitics, and environmental humanities); popular culture, in both film and television (Mad Men and Orphan Black); comparative studies; and genre. He has published articles on topics ranging from Italo Calvino and Ovid to Mad Men and Antonioni, and he has a particular interest in popular genres, including Italian Westerns, science fiction (especially apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic cinema), commedia all’italiana and the “peplum” or the sword-and-sandals film. His most recent book, Descended from Hercules: Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen, covers a century of peplum films from Cabiria to 300, and is the winner of the 2016 AAIS (American Association for Italian Studies) Film/Media book prize. Recent articles include work on cross-dressing in Italian silent cinema, the use of sound in peplum cinema, the importance of transnational movement in European detective fiction, and how Italian horror films engage with environmental thinking.

He is currently at work on a book about Italo Calvino, the body and the voice; it argues that Calvino’s influence is more powerfully felt outside of Italy than within (he is fundamentally a transnational writer), and more outside of literature than within — the book is particularly interested in Calvino’s influence on contemporary arts, especially music.