Alumni Profiles
Emily Antenucci holds a BA from Vassar College in Italian and Drama and an MA from NYU's Department of Italian Studies, where she completed a thesis entitled "Subjects of Desire: Narrative and the Construction of Female Subjectivity in Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore." Prior to joining the graduate program at NYU, she was a recipient of the Fulbright English Teaching Fellowship in Catania, Sicily. Her research interests include 20th century literature and literary culture, questions of authorship and gender, feminist thought in Italy, and the narration of the South. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Vassar College.
Riccardo Antonangeli was awarded his PhD in May 2018. His dissertation was entitled "The Fascist Character as Enigma in Post World War II Italian Literature, Cinema, and Historiography." Prior to arriving at NYU, Riccardo received his BA at the Sapienza University of Rome in Comparative Literature and his MA at the University of Italian Switzerland (Lugano) in Letteratura e Civiltà Italiana. His MA dissertation was entitled “Sinceritas eterna: half-light. Ezra Pound e l’ultimo Pasolini.” His doctoral research explored twentieth century Italian and European literature, following all the deviations his research suggested. In addition, Riccardo follows the many ways in which cinema studies and film analysis go hand in hand with literary criticism, helping to piece together the various images and voices of Man in the 20th-century. He recently published an article entitled “Un’oscura energia nel riconoscere” in Strumenti Critici about scenes of recognition in War and Peace and Thomas Mann’s Joseph.
Gianna Albaum received her B.A. in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, where she was also founder and editor-in-chief of the UC Berkeley Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa, she joined the NYU Italian Studies Ph.D program in 2014. Her research interests include Italian colonial and post-colonial literatures and representations of race and gender in Italian popular culture. In 2016, Gianna completed her M.A. thesis, entitled "Surviving Abandonment: Melancholia and Forgiveness in Elena Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono." She is now a Lecturer in Italian Studies at Smith College.
Director of the Italian Program and Study Abroad Program in Italy
Assistant Professor of Italian
Bard College
Franco Baldasso is Director of the Italian Program and Study Abroad Program in Italy at Bard College, NY, where he is Assistant Professor of Italian. He earned his PhD at New York University in 2014, following an MA at the same institution and a BA at the Università degli Studi di Bologna. He published a book on Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, Il cerchio di gesso. Primo Levi narratore e testimone (Bologna, 2007) and co-edited with Simona Wright an issue of Nemla-Italian Studies titled “Italy in WWII and the Transition to Democracy: Memory, Fiction, Histories.” His articles have appeared in Modern Language Notes, Romance Notes, Context, Nemla-Italian Studies, Poetiche and Scritture Migranti. His awards include the A.W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, NYU Humanities Initiative Honorary Fellowship and the Remarque Institute Doctoral Fellowship. Franco contributes to publicbooks.org and Allegoria. He is member of the scientific committee of the Archivio della Memoria della Grande Guerra of the Centro Studi sulla Grande Guerra “P. Pieri” in Vittorio Veneto (TV). He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled: “Against Redemption: Transition to Post-Fascism and End of Modernism in Italy.”
Assistant Professor of Italian
University of Rochester
Elena Bellina earned her PhD from New York University in 2013. Her dissertation, “The Bounded Self: Autobiographical Writing by Italian Prisoners of War in Africa (1936–1946),” investigates the history of the Italian servicemen who were detained in British camps in East Africa through unpublished memoirs and diaries of WWII Prisoners of War, a part of Italian history that the Italian state preferred not to deal with at the end of the second world conflict in its transition to democracy. She is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Rochester.
Assistant Professor of Italian
University of Texas at Austin
Paola Bonifazio earned her Ph.D. in Italian from New York University in 2008, with a dissertation entitled “Narrating Modernization: Documentary Films in Cold War Italy (1948-1955)." She has published on Italian cinema and co-edited the book State of Exception: Cultural Responses to the Rhetoric of Fear, published by Cambridge Scholars Press in 2006. She is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Texas at Austin.
Giovanni Braico recieved his Ph.D. from the Department of Italian Studies at NYU in 2018. He graduated with a degree in Foreign Languages and Literature from Università della Calabria, Italy, and received his M.A. in Italian Studies from Boston College. He is the author of an article entitled "Il dissidio sull'esistenza dell'inferno nel tardo medioevo: la posizione di Dante," published in Dante: rivista internazionale di studi su Dante Alighieri, XVIII, 2011. Giovanni's research interests include late medieval and early modern witchcraft, demonology, and teratology; conceptions and representations of evil in both written and visual sources; text-image relationships; the transmission of iconographies in the Mediterranean. His dissertation investigates the ontology of the Divine Comedy’s demons in relation to the portrayals of such creatures in various late medieval and early modern European artifacts, especially illuminated manuscripts. Giovanni is currently teaching Italian at Fairfield University.
Associate Professor
University of Warwick
Bryan Brazeau (B.A., Concordia University, 2008; M.A., New York University 2010) earned his Ph.D. from New York University in 2015. His dissertation examined the portrayal of interiority in sixteenth-century Christian epics written in Italy. He is the author of “ ‘Who Wants to Live Forever?’ Overcoming Poetic Immortality in Tasso's Gerusalemme Conquistata,” MLN 129, No.1 (Italian Issue, January, 2014) and " 'I fight auctoritas, auctoritas always wins': Siger of Brabant, Paradiso X and Dante’s Textual Authority,” in Dante and Heterodoxy: The Temptation of Radical Thought in the 13th century, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014) and of the NYU Guide to Medieval and Early Modern Research in Italian Studies. His research interests include early modern conceptions of genre (specifically lyric and epic), the interaction between classical culture and religious values during the Counter-Reformation, chivalric epic (Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso), cultural transactions between early modern Italy and Spain, along with digital humanities projects. Brian is currently an Associate Professor (Liberal Arts) at the University of Warwick (UK), and also has the following responsibilities in his portfolio: Senior Tutor, Director of Student Experience, Departmental Study Abroad Coordinator and International Partnerships Manager, Liberal Arts, & Digital Pedagogy Lead, School for Cross-Faculty Studies.
Assistant Professor, Dartmouth College
Councilor, Dante Society of America
Affiliations: Berkeley Food Institute
Danielle Callegari is an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College and is Councilor of the Dante Society of America. Previously, she was a Lecturer at UC Berkeley and is affiliated with the Berkeley Food Institute. Her research focuses on premodern Italian literature and food and wine studies. She has published on a variety of subjects including Dante, medieval food and wine culture, early modern women’s writing and religion, and modern Italian food and politics. Her first monograph, Dante’s Gluttons: Food and Society in Medieval Italian Literature is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press. She currently has two projects in development: the first on the long history of the Italian cookbook and its politics; the second on Italian journalist Mario Soldati and Italian wine following the creation of the EEC.
Paolo Campolonghi graduated with his PhD in 2019. He also has a degree in philosophy of science from the Università Statale degli Studi di Milano and he received a M.A. in Italian Cultural Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His main research interests include critical and political theory, biopolitics, Holocaust representation, globalization and imperialism, history and philosophy of science (particularly the concepts of "crisis", scientific realism and scientific revolution), cinema and visual culture. He has worked on Primo Levi, Agamben, Gramsci and Pasolini. Currently, he is focusing on global citizenship and situations of “exception” to the Nation-State paradigm, and on the figure of the intellectual in the very recent years of Italian history.
Valeria G. Castelli received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University in 2016. Her dissertation is entitled “Rhetoric, Politics and Ethics in Contemporary Italian Documentary Film.”
Most recently, Valeria was a Visiting Research Scholar at The New School from 2018-2020. Prior to that appointment, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Her research project examined political documentary films made over the last ten years that deal with migration to Italy, particularly with migrants’ journeys to Europe through the Central Mediterranean route and their precarious lives once in Italy. Valeria is part of the Center’s Andrew W. Foundation seminar on the topic of migration and the humanities. Before joining the Mahindra Humanities Center, Valeria was a 2016-17 College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at New York University. Valeria received her Laurea in Lettere moderne with a specialization in Philology from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano and her M.A. in Italian Studies from the University College of London. Valeria was a 2015-16 Public Humanities Fellow at the Humanities New York and the NYU Center for the Humanities, where she designed and developed a Public Humanities Project in collaboration with the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition. From 2013 to 2016, Valeria worked as Assistant Editor and Chief Assistant Editor of the online peer-reviewed journal gender/sexuality/Italy.
Kristin Szostek Chertoff earned her PhD in Italian Studies from NYU in 2019. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A. in Comparative Literature, with her senior thesis focusing on PTSD and first-person narratives. After working as a copywriter for several years, she completed an M.A. in Italian Literature at NYU with a thesis entitled The Wheel, the Light, and the Miracle: Bergsonian Memory in Montale's Verse. Her interests include early 20th century poetry, memory and trauma, literary theory, and literary representations of Rome.
Assistant Director of Programs and Career Services Coordinator
Modern Language Association
Brian DeGrazia holds a PhD in Italian Studies (2019), a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College (2008), and an M.A. in Italian Studies from NYU (2012). His research interests lie predominantly in 20th century Italian literature and cinema, especially Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Gruppo 63, and in queer theory, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics. His dissertation offers a critical history of the HIV/AIDS crisis as it has manifested in Italy. Analyzing responses to the disease at the local level as well as representations of it in various forms of cultural production, the project subsequently seeks to put this history in dialogue with broader scholarship on HIV, to contribute to our understanding of the relationship between disease and culture, and to offer new ideas in the field of biopolitical thought. In the summer of 2015, Brian attended the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University as NYU GSAS's sponsored participant.
Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literature
Fairfield University
Sara E. Diaz earned her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University with a dissertation entitled Dietro a lo sposo, sì la sposa piace': Marriage in Dante’s Commedia. Her research focuses on marriage, gender, and comedy in late medieval and early modern Italian literature. She has published on a number of Italian authors, including Dante and Boccaccio, and recently co-edited and translated Margherita Costa’s 1641 comedy, The Buffoons, for The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2018). She is currently editing and translating Margherita Costa's 1639 Love Letters, again for the OV series. She is an Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Fairfield University.
Linda recieved her B.A. in May 2016 from NYU with a major in Psychology and a minor in Italian Studies. She spent time in July of 2017 on Lampedusa completing fieldwork for her thesis which focused on migration in the Mediterranean and the pivotal role of the island in migrant crossings. The opportunity to complete fieldwork on the island provided a unique experience and dimension to her research. During her time as a student in the masters program, Linda maintained internships in the political and international field that bolstered both her education and research. Linda successfully completed her M.A. in 2018.
Adjunct Assistant Professor in Italian
Portland State University
Lindsay Eufusia earned her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University in 2016. Her research interests include modern Italian literature, film, and culture, the fascist period, issues of gender and identity, considerations of the nation, nationality, and the family, and performativity and performance theory. She received her BA in Italian from the University of California, Berkeley, and worked as an editor in educational publishing prior to joining the graduate program at NYU. In 2007 she was a recipient of an Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the College of Arts and Science for her performance as an instructor of Italian at NYU. Lindsay is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Italian at Northwestern University.
Soraya Garcia was a GSAS student who is recieved her MA at New York University in Italian Studies in 2023. She spent her first year abroad in Florence, Italy and was involved with the Italian Club and the Ballroom Dance Club. Her current focus is on how fusions touch on geographical impacts in life, issues of origin and politics, collectiveness, and the formations of new identities, all concerning music/music production in Italy.
2020-2021 Warburg/I Tatti Joint Fellow
Harvard University
Clément Godbarge received his PhD in Italian Studies in September 2017. Since then, he has taught at NYU and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, where he took part in the Making and Knowing Project. He has published research on early-modern literature, intellectual history, and the digital humanities. He is co-editor of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640 (New York: Making and Knowing Project, 2020).
His research focuses on the influence of medicine in 16th-century European politics. His dissertation is an intellectual biography of Filippo Cavriana (1536-1606), the last physician of Catherine de' Medici and a spy for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Clément is a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. Prior to arriving to New York on a Fulbright Scholarship, he studied Political Science at the Complutense University of Madrid, and Intellectual History at the Warburg Institute of London. Clément also works in the field of the Digital Humanities. For publications and other relevant information, visit Mr. Godbarge's Academia page.
Assistant Professor, Modern Languages & Classics
University of Alabama
Jessica Goethals earned her Ph.D. in Italian Studies at New York University in 2012. Her dissertation, "Representing the Sack of Rome and its Aftermath, 1527-1540," revises common scholarly assumptions about the Sack's cultural impact through a study of Italian and Spanish vernacular literature. In addition to articles on Luigi Guicciardini, Pietro Aretino, and Paolo Giovio, she co-edited Power and Image in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008) with Valerie McGuire and Gaoheng Zhang and is co-editor and -translator of Margherita Costa's The Buffoons (CRRS, Toronto) with Sara Díaz. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at NYU, the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum, and Villa I Tatti — the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. She currently teaches at the University of New Hampshire and is the managing editor of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Jessica is an Assistant Professor of Italian, Modern Languages & Classics, at the University of Alabama.
Lecturer of Italian
Coastal Carolina University
Humberto González Chávez received his PhD in 2020. He specializes in medieval Italian literature, particularly Dante’s Commedia and Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, and in the Italian lyric from its origins in the Occitan tradition to sixteenth-century Petrarchism. He has given papers on Dante and Boccaccio at the annual meetings of the Texas Medieval Society, the Northeastern Modern Language Association, the American Association for Italian Studies, and the American Comparative Literature Association. Most recently he participated in an international conference on Vittoria Colonna at NYU Florence. He has held faculty appointments at The Ohio State University, The University of North Texas, and Baylor University. In 2016-2017 he was visiting scholar at Columbia University and is currently visiting scholar at Charles University in Prague and fellow at the NYU Prague Global Research Institute. He holds a BM in music performance magna cum laude from Texas Christian University, an MA in Italian Studies from The Ohio State University, an MA in Italian Language and Literature from Yale University, and an MPhil in Italian from New York University.
Karen Graves earned her Ph.D. in Italian Studies at New York University in 2019. She also earned her M.A. in Italian Studies at NYU with a thesis on Italian cinema: Circular Poetics of the Gaze from Neorealism to the Early Boom Era. Further pursuing her interest in Italian cinema and culture, and inspired by the femminicidio crisis facing Italy, Karen is currently completing a dissertation that explores the changing figure of the female victim of violence in Italy through the close analysis of popular Italian cinema, as well as legislation and related materials, from the post-war to the present.
Valerie Hoagland received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University in 2016. Her dissertation, "Unstable Exemplarity: The Politics of Female Biography in Early Modern Italy," charts the history and influence of biographical writing on intellectual and creative women between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. "Unstable Exemplarity" expands upon research completed for her M.A. (Italian Studies, NYU), which examined the influence of classical rhetoric in Boccaccio's genre-defining work of female biography, De mulieribus claris.
Holding B.A.s in Classical Studies and Comparative History from the University of Washington, Seattle, Valerie's familiarity with the university space as a student, instructor, and researcher has sparked a deep interest in enriching student experience and university life, both domestically and globally. She is trained in crisis response and has worked extensively across a plethora of university offices, including residential life, academic advising, student health and wellness, and academic programs, as well as with study-abroad campuses across multiple post-secondary institutions.
This year, as part of her mission to service the myriad needs of the university community, Valerie has returned to NYU as a Clinical Social Work Trainee in Counseling and Wellness Services. She is currently enrolled in her final year of the MSW program at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College (CUNY). A more detailed academic profile, including teaching history, conference presentations, and research interests can be found on Valerie's Academia page.
CORE Postdoctoral Fellow
New York University
Rachel Love earned her PhD from NYU in Italian Studies in May 2018. Her essays on 20th-century Italian politics and culture have appeared in the journals Popular Music, Modern Italy, and Interventions. Her current book project, “Songbook for a Revolution: Popular Culture and the New Left in 1960s Italy,” analyzes the political use of folk music in 1960s Italy through the history of a leftist musical collective, the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI). Her interdisciplinary research interests move between contemporary Italian history and literature, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and oral history. For the 2018-2019 academic year, she holds a postdoctoral fellowship in the New York University Core Curriculum.
Lecturer, European Languages and Literatures
Queens College - CUNY
Nicola Lucchi earned his Ph.D. from NYU in 2016. His dissertation, "Assembling Modernity: the Fiat Lingotto Factory and Italy between the World Wars" investigates the social, cultural, and aesthetic resonances of a major Italian industrial concern during the interwar years. Prior to joining NYU, Nicola graduated in Art History from the University of Trieste, Italy. He recently published an article on the painterly work of Eugenio Montale in relation to the poet's late literary production. His research interests include early-20th century Italian literature, visual culture, and the interactions between economy, ideology and culture. Nicola was an assistant editor for Allora - Corso di Italiano, NYU's Italian language textbook, and has extensive organizational experience in academic study abroad. Nicola is currently a lecturer in European Languages and Literatures at Queens College - CUNY.
Lecturer, Italian and Comparative Literature
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Valerie McGuire earned her PhD at NYU in 2013. Her dissertation, “Fascism’s Mediterranean Empire” re-assesses the common assumption that Italian empire was a project authored primarily by Mussolini that culminated in the 1930s. Her study of Italian occupation in the Dodecanese islands, which began in 1912 with the Italian invasion of Libya, and endured through the Second World War, assesses how a set of practices were the basis for a broader project of Italian empire in the Mediterranean in the twentieth century. These practices included organized leisure travel, Italian emigration, and programs to diffuse Italian language and culture throughout the Mediterranean and Balkans. She has published chapters on Italian colonial rule of the Dodecanese in volumes of Italian Studies, Ottoman studies and World War One studies. Her research has also been supported by several grants, including a Fulbright fellowship to Greece (2012-13) and Max Weber postdoctoral fellowship in History from the European University Institute in Florence (2013-14) and a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship for the Mediterranean region from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.
Assistant Professor of Italian and French
University of Massachusetts Boston
Shannon McHugh is Assistant Professor of Italian and French at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She earned her Ph.D. in 2015 with a dissertation on the fluidity of the gendered voice in Renaissance Italian lyric. She has published on women writers and Counter-Reformation religious reform. Most recently, she is editor and translator, with Danielle Callegari, of Diodata Malvasia, 'Writings on the Sisters of San Luca and Their Miraculous Madonna' (Toronto: Iter). Her research has been funded by grants and fellowships from the Renaissance Society of America, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Newberry Library.
Italian Teacher
Westlake High School
Emily Meneghin completed her Masters in Italian Studies in 2019. She earned her B.A. from Franklin & Marshall College in 2015, joint-majoring in Italian and Theatre Studies. In her senior year at Franklin & Marshall College, Emily presented independent research on the efficacy of Commedia dell'Arte's in 2019 satire through film, commenting on modern topics. During the 2016-2017 school year, she taught English Conversation as a Lettrice Madrelingua Inglese at Istituto Einaudi, in Varese, Lombardia. Passionate about social justice as well as the arts, Emily intends to focus academically on how Italian contemporary film creates, portrays, reflects, and/or distorts realities of Italian society, with particular regard to social culture, including sexism, racism, native vs. migrant mentalities, fiction vs. documentary film, and individual vs. communal impact.
Assistant Professor of Italian, Modern Languages & Classics
University of Alabama
Alessandra Montalbano earned her Ph.D. in Italian Studies at New York University in 2012 with a dissertation entitled "Kidnapping in Italy, 1970-2000: Histories of Disembodiment." She has published on Italian literature and film and she is the co-editor, with Jonathan Mullins and Valeria Castelli, of Denuncia: Speak Up in Italy, From Postwar to Today. Madison, NY: Fairleigh Dickinson Press (forthcoming). She is currently teaching philosophy and history at the Liceo Scientifico Guglielmo Marconi in New York. Alessandra is an Assistant Professor of Italian, Modern Languages & Classics, at University of Alabama.
Asstant Professor of Italian
The Ohio State University
Jonathan Mullins earned his Ph.D. from New York University in 2015. He also holds an A.B. in comparative literature from Dartmouth. His dissertation focused on rethinking the historiography of leftist dissent of the 1970s through an examination of its material culture. His research interests include Italian cinema, performance studies, queer theory, 20th century Italian literature and intellectual history, material culture, thing theory, and media studies. He is author of "Desiring Desire in Visconti's Ossessione" (Journal of Romance Studies, Summer 2012) and co-editor, with Valeria Castelli and Alessandra Montalbano, of Denuncia: Speaking Up in Modern Italy (under contract with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press).
Reference and Instruction Librarian; Assistant Professor
Hunter College - CUNY
Jennifer Newman earned her Ph.D. in Italian from New York University in 2015 with a dissertation entitled “Savonarola and Print Culture in Fifteenth-Century Florence.” Her areas of interest include book history, particularly early print in Italy, Renaissance court culture and literature, and digital humanities. She has extensive teaching experience in the Department of Italian Studies at NYU and at New York’s 92nd St YMHA/YWHA. She also holds an MLIS from the Palmer School of Library Science at Long Island University, with a Rare Books and Special Collections Concentration (2014). Jennifer is currently a Reference and Instruction Librarian at Hunter College in New York.
Lecturer of Italian
Yale University
Deborah Pellegrino earned her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University in May 2018. Her dissertation focuses on ricordanze, or memoirs and account books, kept by women from Florence’s wealthy mercantile class between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, and explores the compelling questions of women’s literacy and numeracy. Deborah graduated with a degree in Foreign Languages and Literature from the University of Florence, Italy, and received her M.A. in Italian Studies from Boston College. She is the author of “‘I buoni ammaestramenti che a ogni ora e sopra ogni caso e’ riceverà da lui.’ Un nuovo archetipo di padre mercante nei Ricordi di Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli,” in Quaderni d’Italianistica 35.1 (Spring 2014).
Lecturer of Italian
New York University
Joseph Perna earned his Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University in 2015. His dissertation examined film melodrama and public life from the early 1930s through the late 1950s, with special emphasis on spectatorship and consumer culture. He holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago, and is the author of "Compositional Affect in Ophuls" (The Italianist 34 [2014]). Joseph will be starting a new post as Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of the South.
English Teacher, Sacred Heart Schools
Atherton, CA
Inga Pierson received her Ph.D. in Italian from New York University in 2009 with a dissertation entitled "Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema 1942-1948." In 2009-2010 she was Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian and Film and Media Studies at Colgate University and from 2011-2017, she held various roles at Stanford University. Her interests in film, digital media and Italian converge in a variety of activities from academic scholarship to journalism, digital humanities and teaching.
Associate Professor of Italian Language and Literature, Sarah Lawrence College
Tristana Rorandelli earned her Ph.D. (with distinction) in Italian from New York University in 2007, with a dissertation entitled “Female Identity and the Female Body in Italian Women’s Writings: 1900-1955 (Sibilla Aleramo, Enif Robert, Paola Masino and Alba de Céspedes)” (advisor: Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat). Her research interests focus on 20th-century Italian women’s writings; modern Italian culture, history, and literature; fascism; Western medieval poetry and thought. She was the recipient of the Julie and Ruediger Flik Travel Grant, Sarah Lawrence College, for summer research, 2008; the Penfield fellowship, New York University, 2004; and the Henry Mitchell MacCracken fellowship, New York University, 1998-2002. Her publications include: Nascita e morte della massaia di Paola Masino e la questione del corpo materno nel fascismo in Forum Italicum (Spring 2003). Translations, The Other Place by Barbara Serdakowski and Salvation by Amor Dekhis in Multicultural Literature in Contemporary Italy (editors Graziella Parati and Marie Orton, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). She is Associate Professor of Italian language and literature in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at Sarah Lawrence College.
Giulia Sbaffi received her BA at the Sapienza University of Rome in Medieval, Modern and Contemporary History and her MSc in International History at the London School of Economics. Her thesis examined the significance and influence upon subsequent generations of the set of values and moral imperatives that parents involved in the protests of '68 transmitted to their children. In graduate school, she deepened her interests in understanding the facets of memory and its cultural as well as social representations by studying the historical framing and reframing of the memory of two mass killings carried out by the Nazis in Italy taking into consideration a sociohistorical approach. Since the first years of University, Giulia has always tried to maintain a dialectic approach between researching on memory and history in academia and collecting voices, telling stories, and analysing current phenomena by volunteering for oral history projects and collaborating as journalist with some Italian websites and newspapers. She is also broadening her interest in digital humanities. She graduated with a PhD in Italian Studies in 2023.
Assistant Professor, University College London
Beatrice Sica is Associate Professor in Italian Studies at University College London. Her main research areas are: Italian literature and cultural studies; Futurism and European avant-gardes; and Fascism. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants, including the EURIAS fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Bologna, the Lauro de Bosis visiting fellowship at Harvard University, and the Fondazione Sapegno fellowship at the Collège de France in Paris. Her publications include Poesia surrealista italiana (2007) and L’Italia magica di Gianfranco Contini: storia e interpretazione (2013), as well as other essays on Italian Futurism and French Surrealism; magical realism; Italian literature and art during and after Fascism; Franco-Italian cultural exchanges in the interwar period; Italian poetry. More info on the UCL website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/selcs/people/beatrice-sica
Co-editor, In Dante's Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition
Co-translator, Renaissance Women’s Writing Between the Two Adriatic Shores
College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, New York University
Melissa Swain earned her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University in 2016. She also holds a B.A. in Italian Studies and Art History from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Art and Archeological Conservation from Studio Art Centers International, Florence, Italy. Her dissertation examined the representation of conjugal corulership in figural and literary portraits of fifteenth-century princely couples. She is the co-editor of John Freccero's latest volume, In Dante's Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition, edited with an introduction by Danielle Callegari and Melissa Swain (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015) as well as co-translator of the forthcoming edition of Vittoria Speranza di Bona's verse in Renaissance Women’s Writing Between the Two Adriatic Shores, edited with an introduction and notes by Francesca Maria Gabrielli, translated by Shannon McHugh, Melissa Swain, and Francesca Maria Gabrielli (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2016). Melissa is a 2017-18 College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at New York University.
CORE Postdoctoral Fellow
New York University
Kate Travers graduated with her PhD in May 2021. She has a BA in Medieval and Modern Languages, French and Italian (University of Oxford, 2013) and came to NYU after working for a short time in academic publishing. Her MA thesis focused on gendered voices in medieval Italian lyric exchanges, a theme that forms the core of her proposed dissertation project. Her work focusses on medieval lyric poetry in the Italian, Occitan and French traditions, with a particular interest in texts penned by women authors and the work of Dante. Other research interests include: literary and critical theory, particularly pertaining to the issues of gender and sexuality, and 20th century Italian poetry. She also a co-organizer of the Med-Ren student group MARGIN.
Associate Professor of Italian; Director of Graduate Studies
The University at Buffalo (SUNY)
Paola Ugolini is an Assistant Professor of Italian at The University at Buffalo (SUNY). She is the author of The Court and Its Critics: Anti-Court Sentiments in Early Modern Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2020) and the co-editor and co-translator of Veronica Gambara. Complete Poems: A Bilingual Edition (Toronto, 2014). She is also co-editing the Companion to Pietro Aretino (forthcoming with Brill). In 2014-15 she was a fellow at Villa I Tatti — The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
Assistant Professor of Italian, University of New Hampshire
Anna Wainwright completed her Ph.D. entitled The Politics of Mourning: Widowhood in Italian Renaissance Literature in May 2017. She holds an M.A. from NYU, and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation examines the figure of the widow in early modern Italian literature. Her research interests include early modern women's writing, the Counter-Reformation, epic poetry and crusade, pastoral drama, and merchant literature. She is currently at work on a translation of an untitled late sixteenth-century Italian pastoral drama for The Other Voice Series at the University of Toronto Press with Virginia Cox and Lisa Sampson. Previously, Anna was an editorial assistant for the journal Dante Studies, and a graduate student representative for the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Anna joins the faculty of the University of New Hampshire as an Assistant Professor of Italian in September 2017.
Assistant Professor of Italian and Cinema Studies, University of Toronto
Alberto Zambenedetti completed his Ph.D. in 2012 with a dissertation titled “Italians on the Move: Towards a History of Migration Cinema,” which he wrote under the supervision of Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat. He taught as Lecturer in the Department of World Languages and Literature at the College of Staten Island and as Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cinema Studies Program at Oberlin College. He is the editor of World Film Locations Florence (Intellect Books, 2014), of World Film Locations Cleveland (Intellect Books, 2016), and the co-editor of Federico Fellini. Riprese, riletture, (re)visioni (Franco Cesati Editore, 2016). His articles have appeared in Annali D'Italinistica, Studies in European Cinema, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, and Short Film Studies. Currently, he is working on a monograph titled “Screening Mobility: A History of Italian Cinema Abroad.” Alberto will start a tenure-track position in Fall 2016 as Assistant Professor of Italian and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. He is a cat person.
Samuel Zawacki recently completed his BA in Linguistics and Italian from NYU and his MA in Italian Studies on an accelerated track. His Bachelor thesis explored linguistic gender and its negation in the Italian context. He has also explored gender and masculinity in Baldassarre Castiglione’s Il libro del corteggiano. His current personal project is a translation of Torquato Accetto's Della dissimulazione onesta. He takes a multidisciplinary approach to the field of Italian studies, having a strong foundation in linguistics and its scientific methods. His interests include translation, gender and its effects on both language and society, and the inner-workings of courtly society in Renaissance Italy.
Associate Professor of Italian Studies
University of British Columbia
Gaoheng Zhang joined the University of British Columbia as Assistant Professor of Italian Studies after having worked as Assistant Professor of Italian Cinema at the University of Toronto and as a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities (now the USC Society of Fellows) at the University of Southern California. He was educated in the fields of Italian studies and comparative cultural studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University (B.A.) and at New York University (M.A., Ph.D.). His publications, courses, public talks, and exhibition on modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture have focused on Italy’s global networks through travel, migration, and colonialism during the 19th-21st centuries. He specializes in contemporary Chinese immigration to Italy and Italian-Chinese relations as they are conveyed in print and digital media, television and cinema, and fiction and nonfiction writings. Currently he is under contract to revise a book manuscript titled "Italian-Chinese Cultural Encounters: Chinese Migrants and Globalization in Italy, 1992-2012." He has also begun to research on a new book project tentatively, titled "Mobilities between Italy and China: Colonialism, Exile, Tourism, and Migration." Another major focus of his scholarship and teaching concerns masculinity, gender, and, increasingly, queer studies within Italian and intercultural contexts. As his published articles and Ph.D. dissertation titled "Travel and Italian Masculinities in Gianni Amelio's Cinema" show, a critical understanding of male identities and acts helps to unravel the intricate webs of movement and stasis that Italians have formed locally and internationally throughout the 20th century.
Curriculum Manager, Older Adults Technology Services
Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow
Kimberly Ziegler earned her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University in 2016. Her dissertation engages with oral history, pedagogy, and urban studies to reconstruct the social history of Project Chance, an experimental school for marginalized youth in Naples, Italy. Her M.A. thesis, “Instrumentalizing Naples: The Intersection of Futurism and Neapolitan Culture in Cangiullo’s Piedigrotta,” examines Francesco Cangiullo’s words-in-freedom poem Piedigrotta and its portrayal of the famous music festival as a mixture of popular and avant-garde culture. Prior to NYU, Kimberly received a B.A. in both Philosophy and Modern Languages and Literatures from Kenyon College. She also spent one year in Naples as a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow, studying and participating in local schools’ “Schools Adopt a Monument” project. Her research interests include 20th century Italian literature and film, cultural studies, critical spatial theory, oral history, and history of education. Kimberly is now the Curriculum Manager at Older Adults Technology Services in New York City.
Matthew Zundel graduated from Loyola University Chicago with a B.A. in Italian and a B.S. in Psychology (2012). After spending time working for his alma mater’s John Felice Rome Center he decided to return to the states to pursue his Master’s degree with New York University’s Draper Program for Humanities and Social Thought (2015). There he was able to successfully blend his interests in queer studies, critical theory, and 20th century Italian culture into his thesis entitled, “‘Sono tutti checche latenti:’ Introducing a Radical Italian Queen," which won the department’s Rose and Herbert H. Hirschhorn Thesis Award. In it he investigates the role of affect in Mario Mieli's Elementi di critica omosessuale (1977)—a critical work of gay liberation theory conceived at the height of heated social engagement following 1968. As a doctoral student in the department of Italian Studies, Matthew is excited to gain a deeper understanding of topics pertaining to gender and sexuality, literary and critical theory, and cultural studies—especially the relation between affect, subjectivity, and cultural production in modern and contemporary Italy.
Nina Stemwedel received her B.A. in Italian and Art History from University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also received two certificates in Classics and European Studies (2018). In her time at Madison, she was involved with the Italian Club, was the founder and president of Gli Ambasciatori Italiani of UW-Madison, and received the Christopher and Margaret Kleinhenz Award for Excellence in Italian Studies. As an undergrad, she studied as an exchange student with the Bologna Consortial Studies Program and Università di Bologna. She received her masters at NYU, and her research included the links between witchcraft, magic, the occult, and Catholicism and the Inquisition. Her focus was on feminist, patriarchal and gender issues, and the dynamics of power.
Anna Bagorda, Ph.D. Fall 2010, Dissertation title: IlParadiso e il Liber XXIV philosophorum: l'ente divino ai confini di una metafora.
Paul Bucklin, Ph.D. Spring 2009, Dissertation title: Ne Plus Ultra? Rereading Magnanimity in Dante Alighieri's Convivioand Divine Comedy and Courage in Torguato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered.
Barbara Castaldo, Ph.D. Fall 2007, Dissertation Title: Imputato Pasolini: una rilettura dei processi tra diritto e letteratura
Concetta Chiappetta-Miller, Ph.D. Fall 2005, Dissertation Title: Projections: Monster and Diva from Vision to Voice.
Alexandra Coller, Ph.D. 2005, Dissertation Title: Bella Creanza and Female Destrezza: Women in Italian Renaissance Comedy. Alexandra joined Lehman College (CUNY) in August 2010 as a tenure-track faculty where she teaches courses in Italian language, literature, and culture as well as the core curriculum.
Rosaria A. Pipia, Ph.D. 2007, Dissertation Title: Il Folclore Siciliano In Pirandello Novelliere: Usi costumi credenze e pregiudizi del popolo siciliano
Florence M. Russo, Ph.D. 2007, Dissertation Title: The Presence of Saturn and the aetas aurea in Three Figures of Dante's Comedy: the Medusa, the Siren and Matelda
AnneMarie Tamis-Nasello, Ph.D. 2007, Dissertation Title:Italian Colonial Cinema: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Notions of Alterity. AnneMarie is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Italian at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY.
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