"L’aria l’e cla roba lizira
che sta dalonda la tu testa
e la dventa piò céra quand che t’roid."
Tonino Guerra, "L'aria"
Born and raised in the countryside of the Po Valley between the cities of Bologna and Ferrara, I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my academic career.
I am a native speaker of Italian, a near-Native speaker of English, and I am also fluent in Spanish and proficient in French. As a hobby, I enjoy learning Latin and mastering the grammar of Bolognese dialect, which I spoke while growing up.
A Valedictorian of Pasadena City College I earned a B.A. magna cum laude in English and Comparative Literary Studies and a Minor in Creative Writing at Occidental College and a M.A. in Italian literature from UCLA.
In 2019, I was a Graduate Student Researcher at UC Santa Barbara where I developed the Hybrid Language Program for the Italian Department.
I earned my Ph.D. at UCLA where I also worked as a Teaching Fellow, Graduate Research Mentorship Fellow, and served as Editor/Blind Reviewer for the peer-reviewed academic journal Carte Italiane.
In my dissertation, "Riso amaro: a Cultural History of Rice in Modern Italy" I use different methodological tools such as art, literary, film criticism, ecocriticism, landscape studies, gender studies and food studies, to understand how the collective perception and consumption of rice in Italy since unification has been shaped by various forms of cultural production including literature, the arts, and media, as well as the shifting role played by rice in the Italian imagination.
