Anthony Rizzuto

Office

Advising Area

• First Year Composition

Biography

Dr. Anthony Rizzuto received Bachelor’s degrees in Literature and History from U. C. Santa Cruz, and a PhD from the University of Virginia. Anthony is a first-gen college grad who focuses on issues of social justice and human rights in his teaching and scholarship. In his teaching, he centers students and the empowering tools of writing and thinking for ourselves. He approaches literature and language as part of larger historical moments, social systems, and cultural expressions. He wrote his dissertation on the explosion of political literacy among the working classes in the late eighteenth-century. Since then he has published on how racial ideology was written into the founding of the U.S. (“Paine and Race: Ideologies of Racial Liberalism and Settler Colonialism in the Founding of the United States,” Early American Studies, Spring 2025) and how history gets whitewashed (“Thomas Paine and the Haitian Revolution: The Transformation of an Anecdote,” Early American Studies Miscellany, online, 7/31/25). He exposed the toxic masculinity embedded in ideologies of chivalry in Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). And he co-edited The Annotated Big Sleep (Penguin Random House, 2018), showing all the fun games Raymond Chandler’s classic American noir novel plays with literary history, gender and sexuality performance, images of Los Angeles, slang, and film lore.