Italian Studies

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.