Olivia Rutigliano

Olivia Rutigliano is an American writer and scholar. She is an editor at Literary Hub, where she edits the CrimeReads vertical and writes essays and reviews about film and television. She specializes in the history of entertainment from the Victorian era to the present, and is considered to be one of the country's foremost experts on the history of the Academy Awards.
== Early Life and Education ==
She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in English Literature and Cinema Studies, and simultaneously received a master's degree in English her senior year. She received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant from the Wolf Humanities Center to research Academy Award statuettes that had been stolen or lost. Rutigliano told Mother Jones (magazine) in 2018 that her childhood spent watching classic movies gave way to an interest in the Oscars; she first began to research missing Oscar statues at age 12 when reading about several such examples in a book about Academy Award history. 
== Career ==
After graduating from UPenn, she taught in the English department for one year at the Upper School at Princeton Day School in Princeton, New Jersey, before beginning her PhD at Columbia University in the department of English and Comparative Literature. Rutigliano's academic research primarily focuses on the formation of mass culture and entertainment, specifically around the figure of the detective, beginning in the nineteenth century.
She is an editor at Literary Hub and its vertical CrimeReads, where she began writing essays on film, television, gender, history, and nineteenth-century literature in 2019. Her other essays have appeared in Vanity Fair (magazine)|Vanity Fair', Public Books, Lapham's Quarterly, and The Baffler, among other outlets. In 2014, she co-wrote the PBS holiday special for Christmas in New York (album), which accompanied the album of the same name by Renée Fleming.
In 2021, The Joke, a longform biographical article researched and written by Rutigliano for the production company Vespucci about the life of Susanna M. Salter, was adapted and released as a single-episode audio podcast narrated by Elle Fanning.
== Oscars Research ==
In 2016, while working on her PhD, she revealed that the Academy Award statuette for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress received by Alice Brady had not been stolen, Alice Brady#Awards|as was long believed. It had been thought that, at the Oscars ceremony in 1938, a mystery man had accepted the award on behalf of the absent Brady and then vanished with it. But in an article she wrote in 2016http://quarterly.politicsslashletters.org/stolen-oscars/, Rutigliano revealed that she spoke to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Librarian Libby Wertin, who had found a paper trail indicating that the Oscar was never stolen but was retrieved by Brady's director Henry King. Furthermore, Rutigliano revealed, Brady's Oscar statuette, which had been auctioned recently under the supposition that it was a replacement, was the original. By the time she was 25, she had counted as many as seventy-nine missing Oscars, research that gave her a reputation as one of "the country's foremost experts on the award show's history."
Category:American writers
Category:American scholars