Vito Carrassi holds a PhD in Literary Sciences (Modern Comparative Literatures) and is a member of EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies), SIEF (Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et Folklore) and IFOBS (International Flann O’Brien Society). He has held university courses on Folkloristics (University of Bari) and is currently a contract professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Basilicata. His research focuses particularly on the intersection and interference between folklore and literature, on the history and theory of folk narrative genres, on folk revival/ism and on ritual and popular traditions, topics about which he has written several essays and articles. His main work, Il fairy tale nella tradizione narrativa irlandese, has been translated and published in English as The Irish Fairy Tale: A Narrative Tradition from the Middle Ages to Yeats and Stephens (2012). He is also a translator of historical, anthropological and sociological monographs, as well as author of novels and short stories.
