Writer.
My name is Olivia Rutigliano and I am a writer based in New York City.
I have an unusual full-time job with three parts: I am an Editor at the arts and culture publication Literary Hub as well as Editor of its sister publication CrimeReads, where I’ve worked since July 2019. As of November 2023, I also hold the title of Editor at the publishing house Grove Atlantic (Literary Hub’s parent company), where I was brought on to acquire new titles and expand Grove’s footprint in the crime and mystery genres, in particular.
I have a PhD from Columbia University from the Departments of Theatre, and English and Comparative Literature. My academic specialty is nineteenth-century British literature and theater, but my larger interests include popular entertainment/mass media, spectacle, detectives, heists, capitalism, labor, class, aesthetics, book history, and gender from the nineteenth-century through the present.
I primarily write long- and short-form pieces of cultural and film criticism. My other essays have been published online in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham's Quarterly, Public Books, The Baffler, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Politics/Letters, Points in Case, and Truly*Adventurous, among other places. I’m also a Contributing Editor at the film magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room.
A narrative historical essay I wrote called "The Joke" is currently being optioned in partnership with Elle Fanning, who recorded it as an episode of Vespucci’s "Paperless" podcast, and in 2014, I wrote a PBS television special starring the opera singer Renée Fleming.
I’m represented by Chris Calhoun, at the Chris Calhoun Agency.
My PhD is from Columbia University, where I was the Marion E. Ponsford fellow in the Departments of Theatre, and English and Comparative Literature.
My academic research focuses on entertainment in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain and America. My doctoral dissertation, The Performing Detective: Spectacle and Investigation in Victorian Literature and Theater, analyzes the highly performative character of the Victorian detective, whose reliance on disguise, spectacle, and dramatic excess complicates the associated enactment of surveillance.
I also hold an MPhil and MA in English (specializing in Theater) from Columbia University, and an MA in English (completed simultaneously during my fourth undergraduate year) and Honors BA in Cinema Studies and English from the University of Pennsylvania. I have been the recipient of two fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, among other grants.
Much of my non-academic research concerns the history of popular entertainment, specifically early Hollywood and the Academy Awards. Within this, I’ve done a lot of work digging into a very niche topic: physically stolen Oscars. My research on this subject (and others) has been featured in profiles online and in print in Mother Jones, Forbes, and Dubai’s AIR magazine, as well as on the radio.
“At just 25, Rutigliano has made untangling Oscar lore somewhat of a professional specialty, and although she’s officially an English literature and theatre PhD student at Columbia University, she’s also one of the country’s foremost experts on the award show’s history.”
-“The Incredible True Story of the Oscar Everyone Thought Had Literally Been Stolen,” Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Mother Jones, March 2018
I’m also a short/independent filmmaker. My short film “Walden” was published in The Toast, and I wrote an hour-long PBS holiday special starring the opera singer Renée Fleming, called Renée Fleming: Christmas in New York. I recently completed, for a client, an ethnographic documentary about Yugoslavian female refugees immigrating to the United States in the mid-twentieth century.
