Marco Cerocchi, Ph.D.

Marco Cerocchi is an Associate Professor of Italian.  He earned the Diploma in piano-performance at the Italian National Conservatory of Music in 1995. After having been accepted in a number of Master’s classes with internationally acclaimed pianists, he started to perform concerts as a solo pianist in Europe and in America.

In 2001, he completed the Laurea in Modern Languages and Literatures (music history group) from “La Sapienza” – University of Rome and, the same year, he came to the U.S. to pursue his graduate studies.

In 2002 Prof. Cerocchi earned a Master’s in Italian Studies from Florida State University, and a Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Rutgers University in 2005; then he taught as a lecturer at Princeton University and at The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (the alma mater of Leonard Bernstein and Nino Rota). In 2007, he joined our Faculty of Foreign Languages at La Salle University, where he serves as the area Chair of the division of Italian Studies and the coordinator of the Italian program.

Dr. Cerocchi’s solid background as musicologist and pianist fuels his research interest in the strong relationship and interplay between literature and music.  Prof. Cerocchi delivered many academic papers at national and international conferences, and a number of them were published in refereed academic journals, such as Forum Italicum and Italica. His book – a single authored volume entitled “Funzioni semantiche e metatestuali della musica in Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio” – was published in 2011 by the esteemed Italian publisher Leo S. Olschki Editore. His volume examines how the three authors portray the role of music within the contemporary society, and analyzes the various functions played by music within their literary works. http://www.olschki.it/Prosp/SP/2010/59912.pdf