Alessandro Carrera was born in Lodi, Italy in 1954. He has a Laurea in Philosophy from the Università degli Studi in Milan and a Ph.D. by Publications in Music, Humanities, and Media from the University of Huddersfield, U.K. From 1975 to 1982, he was a music critic, a performing songwriter, and worked in the Milanese musical milieu. From 1982 to 1987, he worked as an executive editor of scientific magazines and pursued scholarly and creative interests. In 1987, he came to the United States as a Lettore d’italiano, a teaching position sponsored by the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs. In that capacity, Carrera taught Italian Language and Literature at the University of Houston (1987-1991), McMaster University (1992-1994) and New York University (1995-2001). As a Visiting professor, he also taught graduate courses in Italian Literature (Columbia, CUNY, SUNY), Comparative Literature (Rutgers), and Aesthetics (New School University). In 2001, the University of Houston hired him as Director of Italian Studies. He is now Full Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. In addition to his scholarly and creative books in Italian, Carrera has published several articles and edited volumes in English. He has edited Massimo Cacciari’s The Unpolitical: For a Radical Critique of Political Reason (New York: Fordham UP, 2009), Italian Critical Theory (“Annali d’Italianistica” 29, 2011, Monographic Issue), Music and Society in Italy (“Forum Italicum,” 49, 2, 2015, Monographic Issue), Massimo Cacciari’s Europe and Empire: On the Political Forms of Globalization (New York: Fordham UP, 2016), Massimo Cacciari’s Philosophy, Mysticism, and the Political: Essays on Dante (SUNY Press, 2021), and Carlo Sini’s On Political Virtue: Plato’s Republic and the Politics of Desire (SUNY Press, 2025). He has co-edited Emanuele Severino’s The Essence of Nihilism (London: Verso Books, 2016, with Ines Testoni). Carrera has also translated into Italian six novels of Graham Greene (The Third Man, The Quiet American, The Honorary Consul, Stamboul Train, Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair), and all the songs and prose of Bob Dylan (Lyrics 1962-2020, Tarantula, Chronicles Vol. 1, The Philosophy of Modern Song). Carrera has been the recipient of the Montale Prize for Poetry (1993), the Loria Prize for short fiction (1998), the Bertolucci Prize for Literary Criticism (2006), the Flaiano Prize for Italian Studies Abroad (2019), and the Marazza Prize for his work as translator (2022). He is Visiting Professor at the Università degli Studi in Brescia, Italy in the Master Program in Artificial Intelligence, Mind, and Enterprise and Visiting Professor in the Master Program in Music Publishing and Production at IULM University in Milan, Italy. Since 2019, he is Editor-in-Chief of “Gradiva: International Journal of Italian Poetry,” a bi-annual peer-reviewed journal (Olschki Publisher, Florence, Italy).TESTO TESTO TESTO