URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2015_Melissa-McCarthy

“My grandfather was a shoemaker, but also a writer, a bit of a poet,” Cappello says. “He left mounds of writing after his death, which my mother captured. And my mom’s a poet, I grew up under her influence as well.” Part of that included gatherings at the home of Eileen Spinelli, poet and a friend of her mother’s in the 1970s. “She’d have groups at her house and invited kids to write poetry in her kitchen,” Cappello says. She never got a first inkling of the career she’d eventually have, she says, adding, “We are always becoming who we are. I’m still becoming a writer somehow.” She was drawn to the sciences early on, and had wanted to major in chemistry, and bring it together with English, to make it less dense, more readable and comprehensible. “I knew science wasn’t impenetrable,” she says. “My friends had trouble because chemistry books weren’t written well. I had a thing about wanting to write the first comprehensible chemistry book. But at Dickinson College, I wasn’t excelling at chemistry. I was excelling in literature.” Cappello always kept the sciences near to hand, and went on to develop a background in medical humanities. She has never separated the researcher in her from the writer, and says one informs the other. For every essay she has written, there is a file drawer of articles, essays and books she has read to deepen her understanding. That’s the scholar in her.

Mary Cappello Professor, Engl ish

“Waylaid by Interest,” on the nature of interest and aversion, inspired by post-Swallow encounters, relationships and discoveries. Cappello has won a Berlin Prize Fellowship that will have her in residence at the Hans Arnhold Center at the American Academy in Berlin for the fall 2015 semester. There, she will bring her most recent book to completion, Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack , with special attention to mood’s relationship to sound. As part of this project, she plans to explore specific sound installations and sound studies venues in and around Berlin. She will also pursue

collaborative work with international artists, scientists, and scholars in acoustic studies at the Universität der Künste and Humboldt Universität to address “mood rooms” as alternative performance and meeting places. Each year the Academy hosts approximately twelve outstanding fellows hailing from across the intellectual and cultural spectrum — history, economics, philosophy, literary studies, sociology — and from the worlds of public policy, the visual and literary arts, poetry, music composition, law, and journalism, with the aim of bringing America’s best and brightest to create dialog and forge partnerships with intellectuals and writers in Germany. Born and raised in Darby, Pennsylvania, a town just outside Philadelphia founded by Quakers, Cappello credits family as being influential in her becoming a writer.

In the early ’90s, she was tired of

“We are always becoming who we are. I’m still becoming a writer somehow.” - Mary Cappello

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