I am an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL. I teach courses on Italian language, literature and culture. I received my PhD in Italian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2007), and I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in International Humanities at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University. I am currently working on a book manuscript entitled "A Quest for Gender. Subjects, Knowledge and Narrative in Modern Italian Novels." Organized around the work of four Italian authors (and six novels), this project explores the intersection between narrative, epistemology and gender in modern Italian literature. I argue that gender informs not only the characters' biography and behavior, but the very narrative and epistemological structures that shape their fictional existence and literary works at large. I have also a passion for the history of publishing and of print technologies. My second book project will be devoted to a sample of Italian "storia dell'editoria" within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special emphasis on Milanese publisher Sonzogno and (of course) on the gendered editorial practices that shaped 'italiani' and 'italiane.'
Articles and Book Reviews
Still figures: Photography, modernity and gender in Neera’s Fotografie matrimoniali, The Italianist (2010)
This essay discusses author Neera's early novel "Fotografie matrimoniali" (1883) in light of its ambiguous...
Corpi estranei and Moving Stereotypes: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Trauma of the Other in "L'odore dell'India", MLN - Modern Language Notes (2009)
Gendered Quests: Analysis, Revelation and the Epistemology of Gender in Neera's "Teresa", "Lydia" and "L'indomani", The Italianist (2008)
This essay is devoted to Milanese fin-de-siècle writer Neera, more specifically to the three novels...