Judy Leveque Caramagno

Thomas Carmelo Caramagno
February 16, 1946 (Los Angeles, CA) – February 1, 2014 (Folsom, CA)

Thomas C. Caramagno was an Associate Professor of English at Folsom Lake College in California (2004–2014), Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska (1990–2003), and Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii (1983-1990). He received his Ph.D. from UCLA and had an MA in Clinical Psychology.

In the world of Virginia Woolf studies, he was best known as the author of the monograph The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness, published by the University of California Press in 1992. Caramagno argues that Woolf creatively used her illness to develop her fictional strategies and depict the fragmented mental activity of her characters. As he states in his introduction, “this interdisciplinary study of Virginia Woolf…re-examines her madness and her fiction in the light of recent discoveries about the biological basis of manic-depressive illness—-findings allied with drug therapies that today help nearly one million American manic-depressives to live happier, more productive lives…By integrating neuroscience, psychobiography, and literary theory…I argue against the arbitrary and subjective practice of reading all symptoms or texts as neurotic disguises supposedly obscuring a causative origin.” Controversial at the time of publication, the book remains in print today.

Caramagno was also the author of Irreconcilable Differences?: Intellectual Stalemate in the Gay Rights Debate (Praeger 2002), Visible Love (Publish America, 2002), and It Isn’t Just Me, Is It?: The Racing Thoughts of a Suburban Anarchist (Publish America 2004).

Caramagno was working on a lecture he planned to teach in Fall 2014 in a course on Postmodernism and Quantum Mechanics and was finishing a novel when he died in February 2014 of pancreatic cancer. He is survived by his wife, Judy Leveque Caramagno.