I am an Assistant Professor of of Teaching in the Department of French & Italian. I specialize on Italian environmental literature and languague, cultural studies, Italian/French cinema, and Italian-American crime films. I completed my Ph.D studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and joined FRIT in 2018.

Thanks to several fellowships I conducted research in literary archives in Bologna, Pavia, and the Institute Primo Levi in Turin on Holocaust studies in 2017-2018 while at UNC. A revised and shorter dissertation chapter on Primo Levi and Liana Millu has also appeared in a shorter version in the volume Scrivere l’orrore, edited by Romano Vecchiet and Angela Fabris. My book manuscript Bodies that Matter in Postwar Italy investigates the impact of sensorial, sociopolitical and linguistic ‘storying bodies’ from postwar literatures/media to today’s narratives (Primo Levi, Liana Millu, Domenico Rea, Anna Maria Ortese, Wu Ming, Elena Ferrante, Andrea Zanzotto and Pier Paolo Pasolini among others) through theories of affective ecology, trauma studies, and biopolitical thought (esp. French, Italian, and German intellectual traditions). 

I am a cultural eco-historian and a media scholar interested in body narratives, environmental humanities, eco-storytelling, dynamics of resistance/resiliencies in Italian modern and contemporary literature, arts, and cinema. I have designed courses that tackle Italian sustainability challenges, landscapes, EU environmental law and cityspaces exposing students to the debates around the Anthropocene. Some of my contributions on eco-pedagogical praxis have appeared on the international online website EcoModLand and I have been partaking in the conversations on sustainability pedagogy and environmental humanities at OSU as well. My reflections on ecologies and visual imaginations of the Italian South have appeared Basilicata and Southern Italy Between Film and Ecology, an edited volume which explores representation of Italian spaces of the South, its socio-historical transformation, its eco-logical strata and characters through documentaries, photography, visual imagination, and films. Other articles on Italian cultural history have appeared in the L’Avventura. International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes, and in the online magazine, LavoroCulturale (particularly Christian Kuate’s works and the question of Blackness in Italy). 

I have also been a contributor of the UNC Future Faculty Excellence Program in strengthening critical skills among students and applying evidence-based intercultural methodologies in the classroom. At OSU, I also collaborated with the Office of Distance Education on active learning methodologies in hybrid/online courses, and was selected for the Meaningful Inquiry grant by the Drake Institute OSU to design inquiry-based assignments in large GE courses on media studies. I am also an Intercultural scholar and a certified IDI administrator.  

I am an avid reader of eco-poetry. My short stories on eco-subjectivity have also appeared on the bilingual magazine, Agua del Pozo/Waters of the well. Currently, I am working on a piece, titled "Looking for Mathera. Poetics from the rocks ", a longing personal gaze-journey into the caves of the old city of Matera and I am reflecting on the challenges and languages of natural subjectivity in a collection called, 'Nature Homing'. 

 

Publications

• Teaching Italian eco-conarratives: Approaches and methodologies. Journal of Romance Studies, Volume 25, Number 2, Liverpool University Press, 2025.
• Exordium. In Baracco A., Gieri M., (eds). Basilicata and Southern Italy between Film and Ecology. Palgrave MacMillan Chicago, 2022.
• L’interfaccia corporale: riflessioni fenomenologiche nei diagrammi letterari di Primo Levi e Liana Millu. Scrivere l’orrore. Letteratura e Shoah. Udine: Biblioteca Civica “V. Joppi”, 2020: 45-60.
• Revisualizing the human body in Crialese and Rosi’s cinematic narratives. L’Avventura. International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes. Roma-Bologna: Il Mulino, 1/2017: 113-128. 

Creative Writing

• Looking for Mathera. Poetics from the rocks (in progress)

• The shape of the sea / La forma del mare (Agua del Pozo. Literary Journal. May 2018) 

• The Human Face (Agua del Pozo. Literary Journal. Aug 2021) 

Recent Activities and Lectures

• Contributions to the implementation of the website Greening Modern Languages
• Active Learning, Office of Distance Education. https://ascode.osu.edu/asc-teaching-forum-active-learning-strategies-online-and-hybrid-courses

Interviews

• A story edited by Franny Larazus for The Ohio State Newsletter 

Blog Interventions

• “Spazi del razzismo strutturale. Leggere il presente per ripensare la Storia e le pratiche di discriminazione” (Spaces of systemic racisms. Reading the present to rethink History and practices of discrimination). LavoroCulturale Blog, 22 Sept. 2020, 

Recent and Upcoming Courses

• Italian 4225: Italian Identities (nationality, race, and ecology)
• Italian 4224: Environmental Italy. Beauty, Power, and the Apocalypse
• Italian 3220: Italy through the Ages (history of naturecultural spaces)
• Italian 5101: Intensive Italian
• Italian 2102: Contemporary Italian Society
• Italian 1101-1103: Italian Blended Language (Online/Hybrid/in-person)
• Frit 3054: Intercultural Competence
• Italian 2055: Mafia Movies (DL)
• Italian 2053: Italian Cinema (Sex and Politics)
• French 2801: French Cinema (assistant)
• Frit 3061: Mediterrean Food Culture 3061 (assistant)