Joseph Buttigieg

Joseph Anthony Buttigieg II ( ; May 20, 1947 – January 27, 2019) was a Maltese-American Marxist literary scholar and translator. He served as William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame until his retirement in 2017, when he was named professor emeritus. Buttigieg co-translated and co-edited the three-volume English edition of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Early life and education Buttigieg was the eldest of eight children born to Joseph Anthony and Maria Concetta Buttigieg (née Portelli) in Hamrun, Malta. He began his education in Hamrun, completing undergraduate work and a master's degree at the University of Malta. He earned a second bachelor's degree, a B.Phil., from Heythrop College of the University of London and a Ph.D. in English (1976; with a dissertation on aesthetics in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) from Binghamton University. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1979. Career and personal life Buttigieg taught at New Mexico State University at Las Cruces starting in 1976 and there met Jennifer Anne Montgomery, also a new faculty member. In 1980, they married and also joined the faculty of Notre Dame. Their son, Pete Buttigieg, was elected as mayor of South Bend, Indiana in 2012, ran for the Democratic nomination as presidential candidate in the 2020 election, and became the Secretary of Transportation under the Biden administration. Pete said in his first book, Shortest Way Home, that his father was called racial slurs, even though he was European, because of his darker skin.