Italian Studies

Giovanna holds a BA in Modern Italian Literature (2017) and an MA in Italian Studies and European Literary Cultures (2020, with honors) from the University of Bologna. Before joining Brown, she worked as an Italian language teaching assistant at the Spring Hill College Italy Center and taught Italian to migrant women at Aprimondo, an NGO based in Bologna.

At Brown, Giovanna works under the supervision of Professor Massimo Riva. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian literature, autotheory, media studies, critical theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, and second-language pedagogy. Reflecting her interdisciplinary interests, she has taught Italian language courses and served as a teaching assistant in the departments of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media.

Giovanna’s dissertation, Grieving Form: Violence and Mourning in Contemporary Italy, examines how violence, loss, and mourning become legible through literary forms and archival practices. The first section explores representations of violence in Simona Vinci’s work, while the second examines how filmmakers such as Alina Marazzi, Beniamino Barrese, Costanza Quatriglio, and Andrea Segre, among others, remediate family archives in response to loss and trauma. The final, autotheoretical section extends these questions into her creative practice, combining poetry, erasure, and personal archival materials to explore mourning and domestic violence within her own family. A version of this project was named a finalist and received an honorable mention in the Premio Nazionale Editoriale di Poesia “Arcipelago Itaca” (2026).

Her poetry has also been recognized by the University of Oxford’s “Italian Poetry Today” Prize (2023) and published in the literary website Nazione Indiana (2025).