Cristina Abbona-Sneider (Brown Ph.D, 1998) is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies. As Director of Italian Language Studies Cristina coordinates and administers the Italian Language Program and serves as supervisor and trainer for graduate teaching assistants. She is also DUS, on-campus Advisor for the Brown-in-Bologna Program and Faculty Advisor for the Italian Club and for the Italian DUG.

Cristina’s research interests include curriculum development, digital pedagogy, alternative assessment, and intercultural learning. She is co-author of Trame. A Contemporary Italian Reader (Yale University Press, 2010) and is currently working on an interactive digital textbook to be used in Intermediate Italian language and culture courses.

Cristina’s passion and commitment to undergraduate teaching at Brown has been recognized with the John Rowe Workman Award for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities.

Caroline Castiglione is Professor of Italian Studies and History. Her research interests include political, legal, gender, and women's history in Italy and Europe between 1500-1800. Her first book, Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640-1760 (Oxford University Press, 2005) won the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies in 2006. Her book Accounting for Affection: Mothering and Politics in Rome, 1630-1730 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) examines the symbiotic evolution of politics and mothering in early modern Rome. She is currently focusing on the political thought of the Venetian author Moderata Fonte.

Sara Colantuono (Ph.D., 2024) is an Italian Studies scholar and a translator. Her dissertation, The Catholic Matrix of Italian Feminism: from Carla Lonzi to Michela Murgia, is an intellectual history of postwar Italian feminism that focuses on the unrecognized cultural  manifestations of a historically and geographically specific form of religious imaginary in the work of several Italian feminist theorists. Her new translation of Leopoldina Fortunati's 1981 book L’Arcano della riproduzione. Casalinghe, prostitute, operai e capitale is forthcoming with Verso. Her translations and scholarly work are forthcoming in a special issue of the Canadian journal Fillip dedicated to Fortunati and Lonzi, and in the collection of essays Italian Feminist Thought: Today and Tomorrow.

Anna Maria Digirolamo (Sorbonne Ph.D., 1996) is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Italian Studies and Director of the Brown-in-Bologna program. She coordinates and teaches the Italian Language and Culture Proseminar in Bologna. She worked for more that 20 years in the study abroad field. She directs the Brown-in-Bologna program since 2011.  

R.L. Martinez has published extensively on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Machiavelli. He is the co-editor, with Robert Durling, of the Oxford University Press edition of Dante's Comedy, and, also with Durling, co-authored a book on Dante's lyrics (Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante's Rime Petrose, University of California Press, 1990). He translated Italian plays and literary criticism. His current research focuses on Dante’s poetic valorization of early modern technologies. In addition to Dante and Trecento Studies, his research interests include Renaissance drama and cultural history.

An Italian native speaker, Laura Odello grew up and was educated in Italy before moving to Paris where she studied with Jacques Derrida, whose works she translated into Italian. She has taught a class on Italian feminism (in Italian) last semester, and team-taught with Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg a Cogut Collaborative seminar on Italian Thought in the spring of 2020. Next semester, she will teach a course in Italian which will explore the idea of the “open” and its structural opposite, “closure,” as they are expressed in Italian culture, between theory, literature, and cinema.    

Massimo Riva ​was educated in Italy (Laurea in Filosofia, University of Florence, 1979) and the United States (Ph.D. in Italian literature, Rutgers University, 1986). He is the author of four books published in Italy: on literary maladies in the 18th century (Saturno e le Grazie, Palermo, 1992), national identity in the 19th-century (Malinconie del Moderno, Ravenna, 2001), literature in the digital age (Il Futuro della Letteratura, Naples, 2011), post-humanism and the hyper-novel (Pinocchio Digitale, Milan, 2012). He is the editor and co-editor of four more books, including a fiction anthology - Italian Tales - published by Yale University Press in 2004 (reprinted in 2007) and the Cambridge University Press edition of Pico della Mirandola's Oration "On Human Dignity" (2012), the result of a collaborative digital project between Brown and the University of Bologna. His latest major publication, a digital monograph entitled Shadow Plays. Virtual Realities in an Analog World published by Stanford University Press in 2022, is the winner of a 2023 Prose Award from the Association of American Publishers in the category of e-Products and a finalist for the 2024 American Council of Learned Societies Open Access Book Prize. An expanded Italian edition of this monograph is forthcoming with Einaudi of Turin (Giochi d'Ombra. Preistoria curiosa della realtà virtuale). 

Prof. Riva is the recipient of three major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation, in support of various digital projects (Decameron Web, Pico Project, Garibaldi Panorama & the Risorgimento) now part of the Virtual Humanities Lab. A series of interactive installations of the Garibaldi moving panorama project were featured in the U.K (British Library in London), Brazil (International Council of Museums, Rio de Janeiro), and Italy (various libraries and museums including the Sala Capitolare of the Italian Senate in Rome, the Sala del Risorgimento of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena and the Biblioteca Sala Borsa in Bologna). Prof. Riva's awards and honors also include the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (with the rank of Ufficiale) for his contribution to the dissemination of Italian culture in North America. For his research-based and innovative use of technology in teaching he was nominated Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence (2014-17).

Prof. Riva is the founder and co-curator of the Cinema Ritrovato on Tour film festival, a collaboration between Brown U. and the Cineteca of Bologna.

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg works on the literature, culture and politics of nineteenth and twentieth century Italy and Germany. She received her B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Essex, Great Britain, her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University, and M.A. in German Studies from Cornell University. After teaching at Cornell University, she came to Brown in 2005. Her book Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-de-Siecle was published by Cornell University Press in 1998. Her second book on the construction of modern Italian identity in the post-Unification period entitled The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians (1860-1930) was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. It was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Manuscript in Italian Studies by the Modern Language Association. In Italy it was published to critical acclaim as L'effetto Pinocchio by Elliot Edizioni in October 2011. Her third book, entitled Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics, was published by Cornell University Press in 2012. Her fourth book, Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Postfascism in the Marshes, has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, and more recently by Brown University's Digital Publication and with the collaboration of Fordham University Press

Lindsay Caplan specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century art, with a focus on the intersections of art, technology, and politics. She is particularly interested in the ways that artists have drawn on computers and cybernetics to envision new models for social engagement and communal life. She holds a PhD in Art History from The CUNY Graduate Center. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues, edited collections, and journals including Grey Room, The Scholar & Feminist Online and e-flux journal. Her current book project shows how early computer artists in Italy deployed new technologies to probe the relationship between subjects and their environment and to explore the nature of human agency, turning artistic questions regarding medium, authorial creativity, and spectatorship to the service of reimagining society in its digital dimensions. 

Fabrizio Fenghi is an assistant professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University specializing in contemporary Russian culture and politics, with a focus on the relationship between art and literature and the shaping of post-Soviet public culture. Fenghi received his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale in 2016. He grew up in Milan, Italy, where he received a B.A. and an M.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures from Milan State University, and spent several years of study and research in Moscow, Russia, where he was affiliated with RGGU (Russian State University for the Humanities) and MGU (Moscow State University). His first book, It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia (University of Wisconsin Press: 2020), studies the ways in which the aesthetics and culture of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, a radical countercultural movement, has influenced the development of Russian protest culture and the formation of state ideology during the Putin era. The project draws on textual analysis and the discussion of ethnographic material, including over forty interviews with contemporary Russian intellectuals and political activists.

Fenghi’s current book project, tentatively entitled The Revolution Will Be Fictionalized: Postmodern Politics and Radical Literature in Putin’s Russia, focuses on the shaping of a specific kind of literary public sphere in Putin’s Russia. In contrast with an otherwise widespread depoliticization of society, the Putin era has witnessed a fundamental politicization of literature and literary institutions. Radical ideologies, both left- and right-wing, have become the subject matter of novels, poems, and literary debates. Reactionary phantasmagorias have been celebrated as “contemporary art,” and major highbrow publishers have come out with entire series about theories and practices of anarchism, terrorism, and revolution. Critics have debated political correctness, called each other fascists, and come out as “black-hundredists” (a term associated with the most brutal forms of ultranationalism and obscurantism). Most recently, the invasion of Ukraine has produced a renewed state of emergency, in which writers and public intellectuals are persecuted and declared foreign agents not just for expressing themselves against the war, but for not expressing their support for it. And questions are raised, both in Russia and globally, on whether more or less canonical authors may be instrumental to Russian imperialism. Drawing on textual analysis and on ethnographic research to be conducted online in Russia and on site in Germany, Latvia, and Georgia, Fenghi’s project investigates the meanings of this radicalization of the cultural field—which, the book argues, reflects a more or less conscious desire to reevaluate ideology and cling to the possibility of political imagination in the aftermath of the neoliberal disaster of the 1990s. At the same time, the book explains how politicized fiction and literary debates have served as laboratories for political narratives and have reflected, and in many ways foretold, larger political processes in Russia and beyond.

At Brown, Fenghi teaches courses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian culture, literature, and politics, Russian language, gender and sexuality, nationalism and national identity. His academic interests include: Soviet and post-Soviet literature and film; post-Soviet politics and ideological discourses; postsocialism; Russian nationalism and national identity; cultural studies; cultural anthropology; postmodernism; visual and iconographic aspects of Soviet culture.

Elisa Giardina Papa is an artist and scholar, Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.

EGP's research-based art practice seeks forms of knowledge and desire that have been lost or forgotten, disqualified, and rendered nonsensical by hegemonic demands for order and legibility. Working across Artificial intelligence-based projects, large-scale video installations, experimental films, and writing, she draws attention to those aspects of our lives that remain radically incomputable.

Her work has been exhibited at the 59th Biennale di Venezia (The Milk of Dreams), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA’s Modern Mondays), the Whitney Museum (Sunrise/Sunset Commission), Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, ICA and Frieze London, BFI London Film Festival, Vienna Secession, 6th Buenos Aires Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018, the Center for Contemporary Art Tashkent, Uzbekistan, M+ Hong Kong, among others.

Her latest art book, Leaking Subjects and Bounding Boxes: On Training AI (Sorry Press, 2022), documents the methods currently used to teach Artificial intelligence to capture, classify, and order the world and presents a collection of images that exceed computation. Forthcoming essays include the foreword for Informatics of Domination (Duke University Press, 2024).

EGP co-founded the artist collective Radha May. Alongside Indian artist Nupur Mathur and Ugandan artist Bathsheba Okwenje, they collaborate on performances and art installations that uncover hidden histories and marginalized sites, examining their intersections with gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

EGP holds a Ph.D. in Film and Media from the University of California, Berkeley, and has previously held positions at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Dana Gooley studied piano at New England Conservatory and English at Wesleyan University before pursuing his Ph.D. in musicology at Princeton University. His research focuses on improvisation, virtuosity, and cosmopolitanism. His Italy-related publications include: “Liszt, Improvisation and the Idea of Italy” and “La commedia del violino: Paganini’s Comic Strains.”

Alani Hicks-Bartlett’s research focuses primarily on Medieval and Early Modern literature, particularly as related to questions of authorship, gender, disability, lyric and epic intertextuality, Petrarchism, classical intertexts, and Early Modern tragedy, as well as the origins and development of opera. Some of her recent publications have appeared in I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Romance Notes, Rivista di Studi Italiani, Quidditas, and Comparative Literature.

Allison Levy is Digital Scholarship Editor at Brown University. An art historian, she has written or edited four scholarly books on early modern Italy and Europe and serves as General Editor of the Amsterdam University Press book series Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700. Allison has held teaching appointments at University College London, Wheaton College, and Tulane University. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, the Getty Research Institute, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation, among others.

Dietrich Neumann's research concentrates mostly on late 19th and early 20th Century Architecture. He has published several books on German skyscrapers of the 1920s, on the history of film sets and lighting design. "A skyscraper for Mussolini" (AAFiles, 2014), his most recent Italy-related publication, describes in detail the work of Italian/Argentinian architect Mario Palanti, who designed skyscrapers in Montevideo and Buenos Aires and then planned the world's tallest skyscraper for the center of Rome under Mussolini.

Eleanor Paynter was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies and at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, working on Africa-Europe mobilities, transnational Italy, and literatures and politics of migration. Her research bridges critical refugee and postcolonial studies and examines questions of race, asylum, and belonging in Italy and the Black Mediterranean through narrative and ethnographic methods, including life narrative and documentary forms, as well as oral history. Research at migrant reception centers, camps, and worksites in Italy informs her forthcoming book Emergency in Transit, which engages a range of testimonies to counter notions of migration as a "crisis." Her current project, Up/Rooted, situates contemporary issues of migrant, racial, and climate justice within a longer cultural history of the figure of the farmworker in modern Italy.

Eleanor is committed to collaborative public humanities projects in the form of podcasts, translations, and writing for broad publics, practices she also brings into the classroom. She was recently Postdoctoral Associate in Migrations at Cornell University. She holds a PhD in Comparative Studies (Ohio State University) and an MFA in poetry (Sarah Lawrence College) and is a member of the Action Research and Rights Collective. In 2023-24 she will teach Borders, Belonging, and Memory in the Black Mediterranean (Fall) and Ethnography, Oral History, and Storytelling: Theories and Methods of Narrating Italy (Spring).

Gretel Rodríguez is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. She specializes in the art, architecture, and archaeology of ancient Rome. Her work investigates the relationship between art and society, exploring issues of viewership, reception, colonialism, and identity in relation to ancient visual culture. Her current book project explores the design and reception of Roman honorific architecture. Professor Rodríguez’s secondary specialization is in the art and architecture of ancient Mesoamerica. She has conducted research in Rome, the Bay of Naples, Southern France, and, in Palenque, Mexico. She is editor of Roman archaeology for the Database of Religious History (DRH), an international digital humanities initiative.

Peter van Dommelen is a Mediterranean archeologist, whose research and teaching revolve around the rural Mediterranean past and present. The regional focus of his work lies in the western Mediterranean, where he carries out long-term fieldwork on the island of Sardinia. He concentrates on later Mediterranean prehistory and the earlier part of Classical Antiquity - roughly the first millennium BCE but comparative studies of ethnographic and recent historical context in the Mediterranean and elsewhere play a crucial role in his research and teaching.

Dedda De Angelis' roots trace back to Naples and Sardinia. A specialist in language pedagogy and the teaching of Italian as L2, and an outstanding teacher, she directed the Italian language program, training four generations of graduate students who went on to pursue brilliant careers in academia (including our current director of undergraduate studies, Cristina Abbona-Sneider). She also supervised and directed the Brown in Bologna program on site for many years.

Franco Fido†, an eighteenth-century specialist and an authority on the work of Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni, directed the Italian program for many years before moving to Harvard in 1990 as the Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures. 

Lina Fruzzetti is an American anthropologist and documentary film director. Her films, co-directed with Ákos Östör, include In My Mother's House, which captures the intimate conversations and daily lives of Fruzzetti's Italo-Eritrean family and explores the repercussions of colonial rule in Africa and the lasting impact of migration and diaspora in Europe and the United States.

Lynn M. Gunzberg (1944-2002) was an Assistant professor of Italian Studies, from 1982 to 1987. She then became Associate dean of college at Brown in 1986, remaining an adjunct associate professor of Italian literature. Her book, Strangers at Home: Jews in the Italian Literary Imagination, was published by the University of California Press in 1992.

David Kertzer joined Brown in 1992 as Paul Dupee, Jr., University Professor of Social Science. A Professor of Anthropology and Italian Studies, he was appointed Provost in 2006, serving in that role until 2011. 

A Brown alumnus (A.B., 1969), Kertzer received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brandeis University in 1974. He was William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor at Bowdoin College from 1989 to 1992. Kertzer twice won the Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies for the best book in Italian history. Kertzer co-founded and for a decade co-edited the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. He served as president of the Social Science History Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe and co-edited the book series "New Perspectives on Anthropological and Social Demography" for Cambridge University Press. His book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997 and has been published in eighteen foreign editions. His 2001 book, The Popes Against the Jews, has been published in nine languages. In 2005 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book, The Pope and Mussolini, which tells the story of the Holy See's relations with Italy's Fascist dictatorship, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2015. His 2018 book, The Pope Who Would be King, tells the story of Pius IX and the Roman Revolution of 1848.  His latest book, The Pope at War. The Secret History of Pope Pius XII, Mussolini and Hitler, has been published in the U.S., Italy, Germany, and Britain.

Evelyn Lincoln is an art historian specializing in the history of print culture and the book in the early modern period, with a special focus on Rome.  She has an appointment in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and is a member of the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World. She received a BA in art and literature from Antioch College, and was a printmaker and curator in San Francisco before returning to study the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.  She is the author of The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker (Yale UP, 2000) and Brilliant Discourse:  Pictures and Readers in Early Modern Rome (Yale UP, 2014), articles on early modern book illustration, and is editor of the digital humanities project, The Theater That Was Rome. She is currently writing a book about the illustration projects of the Parasole family in Counter-Reformation Rome.

Educated at Oxford University, the University of Virginia and Harvard, Anthony Oldcorn is a distinguished Pascoli, Tasso and Dante scholar. He chaired the Italian Studies department at Brown for many years, before retiring in 2000. He also contributed to create and directed the Brown in Bologna program. His publications include: "The Textual Problems of Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Conquistata" (1976); Letture Classensi (1989) and the three volumes of the California Lectura Dantis (with Allen Mandelbaum and Charles Ross). He translated from the work of Seamus Heaney into Italian, and of Carlo Goldoni, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Italo Svevo, Massimo Bontempelli, Gianni Celati and Umberto Eco into English.

Pablo graduated from the University of Zurich with a BA and an MA in Italian and English literature and linguistics. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Posthuman Fairy Tales: Reclaiming Folklore in the Anthropocene,” focuses on the convergence between posthumanism and European classic fairy tales. Combining methods from animal studies, ecocriticism, and posthumanism, the dissertation’s aim is to show how fairy tales thematize and anticipate theoretical discourses of the 21st century on the posthuman epoch. Besides fairy tales and posthumanism, his research interests include children’s literature, dystopic and apocalyptic narratives, Digital Humanities, gender studies, and theater.

Daniel Bate (formerly Daniel Rietze) studies Catholicism in 19th- and 20th-century Italy. He approaches the study of religion through the lives and writings of individual Italian Catholics who lived far from the institutional centers of ecclesial power, but for whom spirituality was a creative pursuit. His research interests include dissent, renewal, and reform in the collective life of the Church; theologies of liberation; mysticism and popular religion; and the exchange between theology, politics, and literature. Daniel's dissertation, "Catholic Ecology: Reinhabiting Italian Landscapes, 1891-1965," interrogates the cosmological dimension of Catholics' emergence as citizens of modern Italy between Rerum Novarum and the Second Vatican Council, tracing how Catholics' renewed thinking about material Creation and humans' connection with the environment animated their renewed sociopolitical activity. This research has been supported by the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago, the American Catholic Historical Association, the Cesare Barbieri Endowment for Italian Culture at Trinity College, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Before coming to Brown, Daniel earned his BA in English and Italian literature at Yale University, and in addition to completing his PhD in Italian Studies, he is currently finishing an MA in Religious Studies through Brown's Open Graduate Education Program. Daniel and his husband are active parishioners at their neighborhood Catholic church. Primary Advisor: Caroline Castiglione

Luca received his B.A. in Media and Cinema Engineering at the Politecnico of Turin and M.A.s in Musicology at the University of Milan and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (UK). He also earned a diploma in classical guitar performance. His interdisciplinary interests in cinema and music include 1930s early sound films, music censorship, and music in totalitarian regimes.

Samuele Capanna is a first-year graduate student in Italian Studies. He graduated in 2019 (BA) and 2022 (MA) from the Università degli Studi di Genova (UNIGE) with degrees in Modern Literature: both of his thesis were dedicated to contemporary Italian poetry, with a special focus on the context of 21st-century scritture di ricerca. In 2020 he studied for a semester at Stockholm University, specifically in the Culture and Aesthetics department thanks to an Erasmus scholarship. During his years at UNIGE he worked as a tutor by providing constant support to students with disabilities and DSA. Out of the academic context, Samuele has always been involved in many volunteering activities: he spent his European Volunteering Service (EVS) in Poland in 2018, and in 2019 he co-founded with some friends the youth network Nassa which still operates in his hometown (Sestri Levante) with several social purposes.

Alessandro graduated in Italian Studies from CUNY – College of Staten Island. He previously studied storytelling and screenwriting at Scuola Holden in Turin and digital filmmaking at the Digital Film Academy in NYC. Alessandro worked as script editor and screenwriter for the television industry in Italy (Tv movies, miniseries, series). He is currently at work on a dissertation titled Italy’s Television Renaissance. Writing long seriality in the 2000s, that investigates how long-form serial storytelling has changed in Italy and what factors and practices within television industry, technology and viewership have informed and defined such transformation. His research interests include: televisual storytelling, transnational television drama, world building narrative practices, transmedia production, cinema, comics. Primary Advisor: Massimo Riva.

Giovanna graduated from Alma Mater University of Bologna with a BA in Modern Literature and a MA in Italian Studies and European Literary Cultures. Her interests include 20th- and 21st-century women writers, visual art, psychoanalysis, medical humanities, and eco-criticism.

Irene graduated cum laude from the University of Turin with a BA in Lettere (2020) and a MA in Italian literature, philology, and linguistics (2022). In her BA thesis, Irene innovatively argued that the Pierid song in Ovid's Metamorphoses is actually a parodic rewriting of a famous Virgil passage. Her MA thesis «Colà dove gioir s'insempra». Apprendimento e trasmissione di conoscenza nel Paradiso di Dante obtained press dignity and is currently published on ministerial website Pubblitesi. Irene's interests range from Dante to intertextuality, literature and power, questione della lingua and the history of the Italian language, ancient Latin poetry, English and Italian Modernism and more. Aside from her Dante research, she is currently exploring Italian novels written during the Fascist era, along with feminist readings of Elena Ferrante and other contemporary female writers.

Gisella holds a BA from the University of Florence and a MA in Italian Studies from the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on the connection between Dante's Comedy and the liturgical rituals of lay confraternities and penances in the Late Middle Ages.

Martina graduated from Sapienza University of Rome with a BA in International Cooperation (2018), a MA in International Management from LUISS (2019) and a MA in Oral History from Columbia University (2023). For her thesis project at Columbia, Martina interviewed the people closest and dearest to her both in Rome and New York, in an attempt to preserve their memories and life stories.

Martina’s interests vary from anthropology, Italian dialects studies, especially in the area of central Italy, Pasolini’s poetry, Roman peripheries and their history and human aspects, Italian literature in Fascist and Post-War Italy.

Agata holds a BA in Modern Languages and Cultures from the University of Catania and a MA in Italian Language and Culture for Foreigners from the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on how contemporary women writers represent female difference and contribute to the construction of a female identity.

Harry Rose graduated from Georgetown University with a BA in Italian and Comparative Literature and a minor in Music in 2020. His interdisciplinary interests include the performing arts, with a particular interest in opera, nineteenth-century Europe, the works of Gabriele D’Annunzio, public humanities, and translation. Since 2012, Harry has regularly published reviews and essays on opera and other related topics for a variety of publications including The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and Parterre Box. Harry was the recipient of the Kernco Foundation Goldman Sachs Fellowship for the Academic Year 2023-2024.

Giovi came to Brown with a M.A. in Media studies from the University of Turin. At Brown, she has pursued a career in Computing and Information Services as an instructional technology specialist. Her research interests are focused on medieval studies, and the figure of Catherine of Siena in particular, the subject of her dissertation, under the direction of Ron Martinez. Over the years, Giovi has contributed to all our digital projects, from the Decameron Web to the Garibaldi and the Risorgimento archive, and has served as Teaching assistant in both language and culture courses. Primary Advisor: Ronald Martinez.

Elettra Solignani completed a double degree program in Italian Literature in 2023, obtaining a BA in Modern Literature from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and a BA in Italian Studies from University College London (UCL). She graduated with first-class honours with a dissertation that analysed the erotic and romantic connotations of the act of reading in Calvino’s literary production.

Her interests focus mainly on the late 19th and 20th centuries, especially the Scapigliatura movement, the avant-gardes, women poets in contemporary Italy, and authors who explored themes such as the body, identity, and illness.

Alongside her academic pursuit, Elettra has participated in several writing and storytelling projects. She was awarded the prize Campiello Giovani for emerging young authors in 2018. She then collaborated with Accademia della Crusca, national and local newspapers, Sole24Ore Business School, Italian novelists, social services and philanthropic associations for a series of talks on literature and mental health. She was awarded by the Verona city council for artistic achievements and social involvement.

Raimondo graduated from IULM in Milan with a BA in Communications and Media
(2017) and a MA in Creative Writing (2019), and from the University of Bologna
with a MA in Italian Studies (2023). He worked as a Junior Editor for the silver screen
at Sky Italia (2018-2019), and has been a long time collaborator of a music critique
webzine, Deer Waves. His main academic interests are comparative and
contemporary global literature, the intersections and correlations between American
and Italian culture and the depiction of the human condition in narratives. He’s also
interested in cinema, game theory and probability and relativity theories.

Andrea Zoller obtained a B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literature from the University of Verona in 2017 and an M.A. in Balkan and Slavic Studies from Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, in 2019. At the same institution, he received an M.A. in Didactics and Promotion of Italian Language and Culture in 2021. 

In recent years, Andrea has primarily dealt with language didactics, reflecting on LGBTQ+ inclusive teaching of Italian culture and self-assessment, un-grading strategies, and accessibility. His professional experience includes a MIUR teaching assistantship in Germany (Domgymnasium Merseburg, 2020-2021) and an appointment as a lecturer in Italian at Dartmouth College (2022-2023).

During his graduate studies, Andrea focused on translation theory, the Italian reception of Soviet “village prose”, and Serbian-Cyrillic printing in XVI-century Venice. With the support of the Leslie Center for the Humanities (Dartmouth College), he is currently working on the unpublished Italian translation of four short novels by the Russian writer Vasily Shukshin. His interdisciplinary interests also involve regional identities and language diversity in the Italian Alps, and he hopes to devote his future research to the Romance-Germanic borders in Trentino-Südtirol.

Christine Andrade graduated with a dissertation on the letters of Bernardo Tasso (1549), with an annotated translation, written under the direction of Anthony Oldcorn. She was already pursuing a successful career as a paralegal in New York City.

Anna Aresi's dissertation, written under the direction of Ron Martinez, focused on the reception of Dante in European modernist poetry ("Modernism Through Dante: T. S. Elliot, Clemente Rebora, and Osip Mandelstam"). She has published on this topic and on Italian women’s writing. Her main interests are translation and reception studies, modernist literature, second language acquisition, and contemplative pedagogy. She one of the founding directors of a newly established literary journal, Il Pietrisco. 
Anna is a translator, editor, and educator based in Providence. Her academic interests include modernist poetry, translation, and reception studies. Among her scholarly publications are: “Dante in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Vision, Mysticism, and the Mind's Journey to God,” (Literature and Theology, 2015) and “Con Dante attraverso il modernismo. T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam e il caso di Clemente Rebora,” in Oltre il canone. Problemi, autori e opere del modernismo italiano (Morlacchi, 2018). Her translations and essays have appeared in Solstice Literary Magazine, Asymptote Journal, and Interno Poesia, among others. Her Italian translation of Polish-born, American poet Ewa Chrusciel’s Contraband of Hoopoe (Omnidawn, 2014) was published by Edizioni Ensemble in 2019 as Contrabbando di upupe.

Roberto Bacci is an outstanding language specialist who came to Brown with a rich experience in translation studies (from Swedish and English into Italian). His research focused on the culture of esotericism and fascism, as reflected in his dissertation, written under the direction of Massimo Riva and entitled: “La Trasmutazione della Coscienza nell’Esoterismo Italiano del Periodo Fascista: Spaccio dei Maghi (1929) di Mario Manlio Rossi e Maschera e Volto dello Spiritualismo Contemporaneo (1932) di Julius Evola.” During his years in our graduate program, he was an NEH research fellow for the Virtual Humanities Lab. After graduation, he went on to pursue a career in Silicon Valley tech companies, including Google.

While at Brown, Francesco Borghesi focused on his major scholarly contribution to date, a critical edition of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Letters, the object of his dissertation, written under the direction of Massimo Riva, later published in Italian by Olschki and forthcoming in English in the I Tatti series of Harvard University Press. He contributed to the Brown-University of Bologna Pico Project and co-edited (with Michael Papio and Massimo Riva) the Cambridge edition of Pico's Oration On Human Dignity (2012). Before joining the faculty at UniMoRe, he was a Senior Lecturer of Italian at the University of Sydney, NSW, Australia. His current research focuses on the diffusion of the idea of ethical concord during the Renaissance and aims at providing an enriched view of the Renaissance's contribution to the definition of common good.

Antonello Borra is a poet, translator and scholar of medieval literature, also the main subject of his graduate work while at Brown, including his dissertation on Guittone d'Arezzo, written under the direction of Anthony Oldcorn. His most recent book is Guittone d’Arezzo. Selected Poems and Prose published by the University of Toronto Press in 2017. He regularly contributes poems, translations, and critical articles to several journals and magazines both in Italy and the United States. His own poetry has been translated into English, Catalan, and German.

Stefania Buccini's research focuses on eighteenth, and early nineteenth-century Italian literature and culture, Baroque novel and poetry, Counter-reformation sacred oratory, libertine fiction and ideology, antique printed editions and early modern manuscripts. Among her books, Il dilemma della Grande Atlantide.  Le Americhe nella letteratura italiana del Settecento e del primo Ottocento (1990), the subject of her dissertation at Brown, written under the direction of Franco Fido, and The Americas in Italian Literature and Culture:  1700-1825 (1997).

At Brown, Linda Campani studied contemporary literature and film, graduating with a dissertation on Bernardo Bertolucci, written under the direction of Franco Fido and Guido Fink, later published as a monograph entitled L'anticonformista: Bernardo Bertolucci e il suo cinema. She then pursued a career in Study-Abroad, achieving her current prestigious position at Stanford.

A Fulbright fellow, Ranieri Cavaceppi spent his formative years in Rome and Washington, DC. His doctoral work at Brown focused on medieval and Renaissance Knights Hospitaller, the subject of his dissertation, written under the direction of Ron Martinez. He also served as on-site assistant director of the Brown in Bologna program.

Educated at the University of Bologna and Brown, Morena Corradi focused on post-unification political and literary journals and fantastic literature, the subject of her dissertation, written under the direction of M. Riva and Remo Ceserani. Her  monograph, based on her dissertation and entitled Spettri d’Italia: scenari del fantastico nell’Italia postunitaria, was published in Italy in 2016.

Elena Daniele came to Brown with a specialization in Italian Teaching Methodologies from the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, and a Master Degree in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology from University of Rome "La Sapienza." At Brown, she pursued research in early modern ethnographic travel writing and was awarded the J. M. Stuart fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library, where she focused on the Italian contribution to the early exploration of the Americas. Her dissertation, written under the direction of Ron Martinez, was entitled "First Representations of New World Cannibals (1493-1497)."

Anna Maria Di Martino wrote her dissertation under the supervision of Franco Fido (later published as “Quel divino ingegno” Giulio Perticari, un intellettuale tra Impero e Restaurazione, Liguori, Napoli, in 1997).  For many years, following her Ph.D., she worked as Assistant Professor and Lecturer in Italian Language programs at Wellesley College, Ohio State University and Brown. She served as Assistant Director, Teacher and Coordinator in the Brown-in-Bologna Program (2000-2011). In 2016 she received a BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples where she presently lives and cultivates her artistic interests.

At Brown, Rala Potter Diakite focused on the medieval period in Italy, the poetry of Dante, early comic verse, Giovanni Villani and the Italian chronicle tradition of the fourteenth century (the subject of her dissertation, written under the direction of Anthony Oldcorn). She was an active member of the Virtual Humanities Lab, after its constitution, working with Matthew Sneider (Brown Ph. D. in History) on the encoding, translation into English, and annotation of a segment of a Villani's Florentine Chronicle. She is currently researching the role of women in the Chronicle.

A Kenyon scholar and University fellow while at Brown, David Downie went on to become a multilingual Paris-based American nonfiction author, crime novelist and journalist who writes most often about culture, food and travel. His first nonfiction book in English was titled Enchanted Liguria (translated into Italian as La Liguria incantata). Other Italy-related titles include: Cooking the Roman Way and Quiet Corners of Rome.

Ted Emery is the author of a monograph, "Goldoni As Librettist: Theatrical Reform and the drammi giocosi per musica" (Peter Lang, 1991), the result of his dissertation work at Brown, under the direction of Franco Fido. With Albert Bermel, he has published a volume of plays by Carlo Gozzi, "Five Tales for the Theatre" (University of Chicago Press, 1989). These translations have appeared widely in professional performances in regional theatres, off-Broadway, and in a Broadway production of "The Green Bird" directed by Julie Taymor. Emery has published articles on Goldoni, Gozzi, Pietro Chiari, Giacomo Casanova, and Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Monica Facchini's research field is Italian cinema and her approach is interdisciplinary, engaging with films, literature, cultural anthropology, and subaltern studies. Her first book, based on her dissertation, written under the direction of M. Riva, was published in Italy in 2017 with the title: Spettacolo della morte e "tecniche del cordoglio" nel cinema degli anni sessanta. Con un saggio su La grande bellezza di Paolo Sorrentino.

After completing her doctoral degree, Filomena Fantarella was a Visiting Assistant Professor and a Research Fellow in Italian Studies. An accomplished teacher, her research interests include the relationship between politics and literature, Fascism and anti-Fascism, the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth century, food studies.  She teaches language and cultural courses. Her book, Un figlio per nemico. Gli affetti di Gaetano Salvemini alla prova dei fascismi, was published by Donzelli Press in July 2018. It was reviewed and praised widely in the Italian press.

Valeria Federici received her PhD in May 2019. Her interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation project, directed by Massimo Riva, entitled “Network culture in Italy in the 1990s and the making of a place for art and activism,” explores the use of information technologies by artists and art collectives operating out of social centers, self-regulated sites of sociality located in and around Italian urban areas. In 2016, with the collaboration of the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University, she completed a digital interface (The Garibaldi Explorer) that investigates the relationships between the Garibaldi Panorama and the visual and textual materials collected in the Harvard Risorgimento Preservation Collection. She rhas published a chapter titled “Television and cinema: Contradictory role models for women in 1950s Italy?” as part of the volume Representations of Female Identity in Italy: From Neoclassicism to the 21st Century (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). Valeria is a postdoctoral research associate at CASVA (the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts) at the National Gallery of Washington.

Evelyn Ferraro's scholarly work addresses questions of human mobility, identity crises, exclusion, and practices of resistance in narratives that belong to and expand the framework of Italian Studies, along with challenging essentialist notions of italianità/italianness and national belonging. At Brown, she wrote a dissertation on the American experience of Italian Jewish writer Ebe Cagli Seidenberg, under the direction of M. Riva. Articles based on this work appeared in Carte Italiane and NeMLA Italian Studies. She is currently investigating issues of refugee women and coalition politics in Cagli’s testimonial writing.

At Brown, Alessandra Franco focused her research on early modern Women’s history and more specifically on the history of charity and welfare, religious patronage networks, and the history of education and literacy. Her dissertation was entitled "The Conservatorio of Santa Caterina della Rosa: Sheltering and Educating Women in Early Modern Rome," written under the direction of Caroline Castiglione. She served as a research assistant for Evelyn Lincoln's digital project The Theatre that Was Rome.

At Brown, Benedetta Gennaro's research concentrated on gender and sexuality studies, women violence and war, with specific focus on the Risorgimento. She has published articles based on her dissertation on such Risorgimento figures as Countess Maria Martini della Torre, and Stamura d'Ancona, written under the direction of M. Riva. While at Brown, she also contributed to the Garibaldi and the Risorgimento project. After a stint in the Institute of Sociology at Technical University, Darmstadt, she has pursued a career in administration at that institution where she is now Head of International Student Services.

At Brown, Nicole Gercke was both a doctoral and postdoctoral fellow in Italian Studies and the Virtual Humanities Lab, working on digital humanities projects for the Decameron Web. She was the recipient of an exchange fellowship from the University of Bologna to explore “Humanism, Neohumanism and Posthumanism in the Media Age.”​ Her dissertation, written under the direction of M. Riva,  focused on how modern Italian authors, including polymath Alberto Savinio, reimagined medical, scientific and technological developments in their work across media.

At Brown, Chandra Harris researched and wrote a dissertation on the representation of African-Americans in cinematic Neo-realism, under the direction of M. Riva,  and contributed to the Decameron Web, editing the module on Boccaccio and film (the work of Pasolini, in particular). Before joining the faculty at Moses Brown, she taught at the University of Rhode Island.

Morris graduated with a BA in Economics and a MA in Philosophy at La Sapienza in Rome. His dissertation, titled “A time of actual genius: Leopardi interprets the Renaissance”, focuses on the nineteenth century poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi and on his interpretation of the Renaissance. It investigates how, at the dawn of the struggle for Italian independence, when Leopardi was writing, the interpretation of the Renaissance was a central issue in the discourse on national identity. Reading the Renaissance within the frame of his critique of modernity, Leopardi provides an original understanding of the relationship between history, metaphysics and poetry. After completing his PhD, in AY 2021-22, Morris was Dean's Faculty Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Cogut Institute. Primary Advisor: Massimo Riva.

At Brown, Jacqueline Lentini wrote her Master's thesis on Macchiavellli's play, "la Mandragora" under the direction of Prof. Massimo Riva. For over twenty years, she has been working in the field of U.S. business employment immigration and is licensed to practice law in Illinois.

Roberto Ludovico's research while at Brown focused on Italian and European modernism, literature and periodicals of the Fascist era, the work of Italo Calvino, and the culture and literature of Trieste. His interests also include the tradition of Italian gastronomy. His dissertation, written under the direction of M. Riva and entitled "Una farfalla chiamata Solaria tra l'Europa e il romanzo," was published in Italy in 2010. He co-organized (with Lino Pertile of Harvard U. and M. Riva) the first International Conference on the work of literary critic and scholar Renato Poggioli, editing and introducing the proceedings, published by Olschki in 2012.

Franco Manai has published on many Italian authors, including Francesco Petrarca, Pietro Bembo, Niccolò Machiavelli, Carlo Goldoni, Pierpaolo Pasolini, Leonardo Sciascia. He has written a book entitled Capuana e la letteratura campagnola (Pisa: Etp, 1997) where he studies the contribution of Luigi Capuana to  the representation of rural life in Italian fiction till the 1910s. In 2006 he published a book entitled Cosa succede a Fraus? Sardegna e mondo nel racconto di Giulio Angioni (Cagliari: Cuec) where he studies the fiction of contemporary fiction writer and anthropologist Giulio Angioni. In 2015 he co-edited a book on Italian postcolonial media production, Memoria storica e postcolonialismo. Il caso italiano.

Stephen has two decades of experience in the field of study abroad in Italy. He has lived and worked in Bologna and Rome, where he served first as the Assistant Director of Brown University’s program in Bologna and more recently as Director of Trinity College’s Rome Campus. Motivated by the desire to have an immersive cultural exchange experience, he initially moved to Italy to teach English in private and public schools after finishing his B.A. in Art History at the University of Georgia. He holds a Ph.D. in Italian Studies from Brown University and an M.A. in Italian from Middlebury College. Stephen’s research and teaching interests include twentieth-century visual arts and design, in particular Italian Futurism.

Karina Mascorro's dissertation at Brown, written under the direction of Lina Fruzzetti and M. Riva, examined the interplay between ethnography and fiction in the work of postcolonial Afro-Italian female writers, showing how Afro-Italian women writers’ texts serve to remember and legitimize a highly contested historical period with lasting social and cultural effects, persisting into the modern era. After completing her PHD she worked at RIC, where she developed her leadership skills as an administrator to create a center on a university campus that focused on foreign language acquisition through kinesthetic learning. These and other professional skills brought her back to her native California where she currently is Director of Alumni Engagement at the Luskin School of Public Affairs of UCLA.

Leonora graduated from the International University of Siena with a BA in Linguistics and Intercultural Communication and a certificate in Certification of Competence in Teaching Italian to Foreigners (DITALS). Her research focuses on cultural production during colonialism. She is looking at representations of political nationalism in Italian and British documentaries from a comparative view. Prior to Brown, Leonora worked for two years as Visiting International Scholar at Dickinson College in Carlisle PA, where she taught Italian Language and Culture (beginner and advanced levels). She is on the editorial board of an ongoing digital project about poetry-in-translation, the on-line journal "Purple-Ink." Primary Advisors: Lina Fruzzetti and David Kertzer.

Giorgio Melloni's primary research interests are the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special concentration on cinema studies, theater and literature in hypertext. At Brown, he was a founding member of the Decameron Web team and later contributed to the Pico Project as well. His dissertation was focused on Giacomo Manzoni. He has published articles on Italian literature and cinema in peer-reviewed journals such as Lingua e Stile, Strumenti critici, Il lettore di provincia, La questione romantica, Intersezioni, Bollettino 900, Italica and Rivista di Studi Italiani. He is currently writing a book on twentieth-century novelist and playwright, Federigo Tozzi.

Amanda Minervini's research focuses on Religion and politics, documentary filmmaking, Holocaust representations, political theory, with a comparative focus on Italian, Anglo-American, and French literature. Her dissertation at Brown, written under the direction of Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, focused on the figure of St. Francis of Assisi and the symbolism of stigmata. An article based on it and entitled "Face to Face: Iconic Representations and Juxtapositions of St. Francis of Assisi and Mussolini during Italian Fascism," is forthcoming in a collective volume on Tot Art: The Visual Arts, Fascism(s), and Mass-Society (Cambridge Scholars Press).

Erica Moretti's research at Brown focused on the work of the Italian educator Maria Montessori, also the object of her dissertation, written under the direction of Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg. Her first book, based on her dissertation,The Best Weapon for Peace: Maria Montessori, Education and Children’s Rights, was published in 2020 and received the 2021 American Association of Italian Studies Book Prize in the category of First Book, as we as the ISCHE First Book Award, granted by the International Standing Conference for the History of Education. In 2023-24, Erica was the Millicent Mercer Johnsen/National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, where she pursued research about her next project, Across the Colonial Sea: Family Reunification, Vatican Humanitarianism, and the End of Empire (1943–1950) for which she was also the recipient of a awarded a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship in 2022-23.

A distinguished Boccaccio scholar and past president of the American Boccaccio Association, while at Brown, Michael Papio contributed to the creation of the Decameron Web as co-editor with M. Riva, while working on his dissertation on late-medieval novella, written under the direction of Anthony Oldcorn and later published as a monograph with the title Keen and Violent Remedies: Social Satire and the Grotesque in Masuccio Salernitano's Novellino, Peter Lang, 2000). He was a founding member of the Brown-University of Bologna Pico della Mirandola Project and later co-edited with F. Borghesi and M. Riva the English edition of Pico's Oration on Human Dignity (Cambridge 2012). He was an inaugural member and contributor of the Virtual Humanities Lab (2004-2006).

The main focus of Sergio Parussa's research and publications is the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in twentieth-century Italian literature, in particular, how authors who write from a culturally marginal perspective challenge the highly coded Italian literary tradition. His dissertation at Brown, written under the direction of M. Riva, was published in 2003 with the title Eros Onnipotente: erotismo, letteratura e impegno nell'opera di Pier Paolo Pasolini e Jean Genet. He has investigated the relationship between Judaism and writing in contemporary Italian literature, in his second book, Writing as Freedom, Writing as Testimony: Four Italian Writers and Judaism (Syracuse University Press, 2008).

A Fulbright fellow, Cristina Pausini graduated from Brown with a dissertation on Sicilian writer Maria Messina, written under the direction of M. Riva and entitled: Le "briciole" della letteratura: i racconti e i romanzi di Maria Messina (The "Crumbs" of Literature: Maria Messina's Short-Stories and Novels) published in Italy by Clueb, Bologna, in 2001. Her interests include Modern and contemporary Italian literature, women's studies, and the pedagogy of Italian as a foreign language through cinema, modern media, and instructional technology.

Tommaso graduated from the University of Pavia, Italy, with a thesis on the poetic work of Primo Levi. Before joining the Italian Department at Brown he was a visiting student at the Trinity College Dublin and at the University of Cambridge and language instructor at Florida State University. His research interests converge on the study of the cultural memory of the Shoah in the Italian context and on the interrelation between colonial and anti-Semitic racial policies. His dissertation project, The Shoah and Italian Writers. Perspectives on Postwar Nontestimonial Literature, explores the development of Italy's champ littéraire of nontestimonial literature about the Jewish genocide. In addition, Tommaso is working on a monographic volume dedicated to the study of macrotextual structures in the narrative work of Primo Levi (Scrittura chiara, scrittura del complesso. Quattro esercizi sulle macrotestualità di Primo Levi). His articles have appeared in Testo, Carte Italiane, Italianistica, Il confronto letterario, Ticontre, Horizonte, and he has presented his research in conferences in the USA, UK, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Italy. In 2018, he co-organized the 11th edition of Chiasmi, the Harvard-Brown Graduate Conference in Italian Studies. Primary Advisor: Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg.

Thomas Peterson’s research focuses on the lyric and epic poetry of the Italian tradition (Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Leopardi, Carducci, Pascoli), twentieth century Italian poetry (Ungaretti, Valeri, Montale, Fortini, Pasolini, Rosselli, Giudici), and the Italian short story and novel with an emphasis on women writers (Deledda, Banti, Morante, Moravia, Petrignani).  He has also published extensively in the philosophy of education. At Brown, he wrote a dissertation under the direction of Anthony Oldcorn.

Mauro Resmini's research is situated at the intersection between cinema and critical theory, with a specific focus on the Italian context. At Brown, he designed an Integrative Study doctoral degree in Italian and Visual studies, in collaboration with MCM faculty. His dissertation, co-directed by Mary Ann Doane and M. Riva and titled "The Failure of Fantasy: Genre and Form in Contemporary Film," focused on genres across national cinemas, with a psychoanalytical approach. He is the author of Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long '68 (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), and has published essays on Italian and European cinema and media, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and the relationship between cinema and politics. 

Before pursuing her Ph.D. at Brown, Michela Ronzani worked as a music agent for soloists and conductors in Milan. At Brown, she contributed to the organization of the Cinema Ritrovato Film Festival, in collaboration with the Cineteca of Bologna, and a series of symphonic and chamber music concerts featuring Italian composers. Her dissertation, written under the direction of Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, focused on La Scala of Milan at the turn of the twentieth century. Among her publications, an essay entitled  “Creating Success and Forming Imaginaries: The Innovative Advertisement for Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème (1896)” in the volume The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World.

Catherine Sama is an Italian American of Calabrian extraction. Venice is her home away from home. Her research explores the ways in which Italian women of the eighteenth-century created spaces for themselves in literary and artistic professions by drawing on male patronage, networking with other women, and carefully negotiating of the gendered boundaries of their society.  Her work focuses on three Venetian women: the journalist-publisher, Elisabetta Caminer Turra (1751-96) - also the subject of her dissertation at Brown, written under the direction of Franco Fido - the poet-playwright Luisa Bergalli Gozzi (1709-1779), and the artist Rosalba Carriera (1763-1757). Her current book project (with co-translator Julia Kisacky) is a scholarly edition of Rosalba Carriera’s correspondence in English translation for the “Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” series of the University of Toronto Press.

Anna Santucci received her PhD in Italian Studies in 2018 and an MA in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies in 2016.  Her dissertation project focused on the integration of the performing arts in critical pedagogies of foreign language and culture (Primary Advisor Massimo Riva). Anna joined University College Cork in 2022 as Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Teaching and Learning Enhancement in the Centre for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL). She directs CIRTL’s MA program in Teaching and Learning for Higher Education and co-leads UCC’s contributions to Teaching & Learning efforts for the UNIC European University alliance. Before joining UCC, Anna was Faculty Development Specialist in the Office for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at University of Rhode Island (USA).

Andrea is from Milan, Italy. He earned a laurea specialistica in Philosophy from Ca' Foscari University (1999), an MA in Digital Humanities from the State University of Milan (2000) as well as an MA in Italian Studies from Florida State University (2015). His research interests include: Continental Philosophy, the Modern Italian Novel, Freud and Psychoanalysis, Gender Studies. His dissertation, titled The Struggle for Life in the Modern Italian Novel 1859-1925, (Primary Advisor: Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg) was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022. He is the author of Assaliti dalle mille luci del cielo. La cultura della percezione, (Quodlibet Materiali IT, 2023). He has also published articles and reviews  in Italica, Altrelettere, Annali d'Italianistica, Italian Quarterly. He is the author of the novel Scompenso  (2010), and "L'Inventalavoro. Guida alle professioni creative e innovative", (2012).

Chiara Sartori's research at Brown was focused on modern and contemporary literature and her dissertation, co-directed by David Kertzer and M. Riva, analyzed the relationship of ethnicity and (national) identity in the border region of Gorizia, Italy, where she is from.

Stefano Selenu's research at Brown included the role of language and political thought in medieval-Renaissance Italian literature and culture, as well as Mediterranean inter-culturality in Dante and Boccaccio. His dissertation, written under the direction of Ron Martinez, was entitled “The Linguistic Problem in Dante: A Gramscian Pathway Toward the Modern Vernacular World.” He has published essays on Dante and Antonio Gramsci including the book Ideas: Dante, Gramsci e il sardo comune, awarded the Antonio Gramsci Prize in 2005. Before leaving academia, Stefano taught at Cornell University, the University of Oklahoma, and Syracuse University where he was Assistant Teaching Professor and Coordinator of the Italian language program until 2020.

At Brown, Maria Sepa wrote a dissertation on “Ennio Flaiano scrittore per il cinema," co-directed by Anthony Oldcorn and Franco Fido. She went on to teach Italian literature at University of Virginia, Wellesley College, Brown University in Bologna, and is currently teaching at IES Milan, and Università Cattolica, Milan. She is also translating from English into Italian for the cultural pages of Il Corriere della Sera. She is engaged in promoting a dialogue between American and Italian studies, through her blog. She is the author of Milano downtown, a novel (Manni, 2013).

Carla Simonini was born and raised in Providence.  Her Italian roots trace back to Tuscany and Lazio, and her father's family was among the first 12 families from Italy to settle in Providence, around the 1870s, in an area that became Little Italy on Federal Hill. Her research at Brown was focused on women voices in Italian-American literature, including her dissertation, co-directed by M. Riva and Fred Gardaphe. She was recently awarded the prestigious inaugural Paul and Ann Rubino Endowed Professorship of Italian American Studies at Loyola University in Chicago, where she will direct the newly established Italian-American studies program.

During her years at Brown, Antonella Sisto focused on film studies. In her dissertation, written under the direction of M. Riva and published in a book entitled Film Sound in Italy. Listening to the Screen (Palgrave-McMillan, 2014), she engaged in a critical re-thinking of the primacy of the visual in film studies, in an attempt to re-discover the phonic and sonic dimension of the cinematic experience. She was a member of the organizing committee of the first Brown-Harvard Graduate Student Conference, Chiasmi, entitled Cultural margins/marginal cultures, held in March 2008. After graduating, Antonella was Five-College Mellon post-doctoral fellow in Italian and film studies, based in Amherst, and a post-doctoral fellow at Brown. Her work in progress links film to eco-criticism and acoustic ecology. She regularly contributes to the Cinema Ritrovato Film Festival.

At Brown, Giuseppe Strazzeri focused on modern and contemporary literature, writing a dissertation under the direction of M. Riva and A. Oldcorn. He went on to teach at Seaton Hall University for a few years, before returning to Italy.  His first introduction to the world of publishing was through literary translation. After translating into Italian such authors as Richard Powers, Susan Sontag, Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates, and consulting for various Italian houses from the US, he decided to move from academia to publishing, pursuing a brilliant career as editorial director.

At Brown, Vika Zafrin designed an Integrative Study Ph.D. in Italian studies and Digital Humanities. Her groundbreaking dissertation, written under the direction of M. Riva, was focused on the Roland Corpus, from La Chanson de Roland to Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto Orlando Furioso, and was conceived as a Hypertextual application that she designed and implemented. In 2004-06, she was NEH Project Director of the Virtual Humanities Lab. Before her current position she was a Digital Scholarship Librarian at Boston University, until 2020.

Francesca Zambon earned her PhD in Italian Studies at Brown University in 2023 with a dissertation entitled, "Resistance to and through Autobiography: Poetry and Politics in Post-War Italy." Francesca Zambon received her BA from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, writing a thesis in the field of Comparative Literature, and an MA in Lettere Moderne from the University of Bologna (2016), where she specialized in the study of 20^th-century neo-avant-garde poetry with a specific interest in the figure of Edoardo Sanguineti. Francesca’s research centers on the intersection between poetry and history in 20^th-century Italian poetry with an emphasis on the 60s and the 70s. She is interested in investigating the militant, activist and experimental work that was created in those years in an effort to reframe the notions of militancy and gender while shedding light on authors and historical events that were marginalized or erased from the critical and cultural discourse.