Professor of Italian & Dean of Arts and Humanities

Dana researches and teaches on Italian film and media studies, with a focus on television. She is core faculty in Film Studies, The Department of Comparative Studies  and The Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 

She has published broadly on Italian television and cinema, with special attention paid to the mafia and representations of youth. She has the monographs Unfinished Business: Screening the Italian Mafia in the New Millennium (University of Toronto Press, 2013) and Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television: Gomorrah and Beyond (Palgrave, 2019) and the co-authored book Internal Exile in Fascist Italy: History and Representations of Confino (with Elizabeth Leake and Piero Garofalo, University of Manchester Press, 2019), the edited volume Mafia Movies: A Reader, 2nd Edition (University of Toronto Press, 2019), and the co-edited volumes Contemporary Italian Youth Television (with Luca Barra, Danielle Hipkins, and Catherine O'Rawe, Palgrave, 2025) and Transnational Italian Crime and the Illegality and the Making of Italy: Crime Italian Style (with Stephanie Malia Hom, Liverpool University Press, 2026). 

Dana is working on a book called #Casting Stardom in Contemporary Italian Youth Television which is a study of casting practices in contemporary, popular Italian tv that has found significant audiences outside of Italy.