Alessandro Portelli (born July 8, 1942) is an Italian scholar of American literature and culture, oral historian, writer for the daily newspaper il manifesto, and musicologist. He is a professor of Anglo-American literature at the University of Rome La Sapienza. In the United States he is best known for his oral history work, which has compared workers' accounts of industrial conflicts in Harlan County, Kentucky and Terni, Italy.Currently he is a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University, co-teaching a course on Bruce Springsteen's America.He received Dan David Prize in 2015 for Retrieving the Past.