Graduate Students and Teaching Assistants in Italian Studies
190 Hope Street, Room 301 and 303
Telephone: (401) 863-2430
Anna Aresi
Anna Aresi is a second-year graduate student in the Italian Studies Department. She graduated from the University of Padua with a BA Classics (2006 ) and a MA in Italian Modern Literature and Philology (2008). In 2008, she also spent one semester as an exchange student at UC Berkeley. At the moment, she's mainly working on the reception of Dante in the 20th century.
Anna_Aresi@brown.edu
Roberto Bacci
Roberto Bacci
received his laurea summa cum laude in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures (Scandinavian and English) from the Department of Literature and Philosophy at Università di Bologna (Italy) in 1997. Part of his dissertation on the poetics of Arnulf Øverland has been published in Norway. He translated from Norwegian and Swedish into Italian novels by Jostein Gaarder and Marianne Fredriksson for the publisher house Longanesi & C. in Milan. He has also translated into Norwegian poems by contemporary Italian authors for the volume Poetisk modernisme (Oslo: Det norske Samlaget, 1995; with Eva Jensen and Guri Vesaas). He was an instructor in Italian at the University of Georgia from 1999 to 2001. In 2003 he enrolled in the PhD program in Italian Studies at Brown University, where he has taught intermediate and advanced Italian courses. He his now writing his PhD dissertation on “Esotericism and Self-Transmutation during the Fascist Period in Italy.” His research interests include: Western esotericism in the 20th century; esotericism and politics during the interwar/fascist period; individual self-transmutation, self-consciousness and altered states of consciousness in literature, art and philosophy; modernism and anti-modernism in Scandinavian literatures. Roberto_Bacci@brown.edu
Lianca Carlesi
Wuming Chang
Elena Daniele
Originally from Padova, Elena Daniele studied Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at La Sapienza University in Rome and graduated in 2005 after completing field work in the Amazon forest. She then received a M.A. in Italian Teaching Methodology from Università per Stranieri di Perugia in 2006 and has been teaching Italian language ever since. Her teaching experience includes Italian instruction at Università per Stranieri di Perugia, Ateneo Salesiano in Rome, and Brown University. Before enrolling in the PhD program in Italian Studies at Brown, she worked as an intern at the Italian Consulate in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Thanks to the generous support of the John Carter Brown Library, she has been awarded the Stuart Fellowship for the academic year 2012-2013 and is currently writing her dissertation on Ethnographic Writing in Early Modern Travel Literature, focusing on the theme of cannibalism. Elena_Daniele@brown.edu
Monica Facchini
Monica is a PhD candidate in the Italian Studies department at Brown University. In 2003, she received her laurea summa cum laude in Foreign Languages and Literatures (German and English) from the University of Lecce, Italy, with a dissertation thesis entitled "Marieluise Fleiβer und die Fröste der Freiheit" on the German playwright Marieluise Fleiβer and her relationship with Bertolt Brecht and the Weimar Republic intellectuals. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation on the Italian political cinema of the 1960s as an expression of "subaltern cinema", with a special focus on the films by Francesco Rosi, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Her research interests include film studies, visual culture, gender, subaltern studies, and Italian literature. Her article entitled “Lamento, ordine e subalternità in Salvatore Giuliano” is forthcoming in the online journal California Italian Studies (expected for November 2009). By focusing on the cinematic representation of mourning rituals, this article investigates the relationship between power and death in Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano. Furthermore, with the collaboration of the graduate students in Italian Studies at Brown and Harvard Universities, Monica is currently co-organizing with Kyle M. Hall (Harvard) Chiasmi, the third Brown-Harvard Graduate Conference in Italian Studies on "Viewing Change/Changing Views," to be held on March 12-13, 2010. Monica taught English and German in Italy and Italian at different levels at Brown University and Brown in Bologna. In the academic year 2008-2009 she was nominated for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching at Brown. E-mail: monica_facchini@brown.edu
Mena Fantarella
Alessandra Franco
Alessandra Franco graduated summa cum laude in Lettere classiche from the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” Her laurea thesis, “La Vita di Macrina: una biografia femminile dalla tarda antichità” (The Life of Macrina: A Female Biography from Late Antiquity), explored the development of female monasticism during the course of the fourth century. She has taught Italian in Rome and in the United States (University of Dayton and Saint Louis University). She started her PhD work at Brown in 2009, with a focus on medieval and early modern Italian literature. Her main academic interests include Dante studies and Renaissance history. Alessandra_Franco@brown.edu
Nicole Gercke
Nicole Gercke received a B.A in Classics from Dartmouth College with a minor in Studio Art. After college, she spent time in Edinburgh, Scotland and at a small art school in Greece. She worked for several years writing and designing elementary math lessons for an online instructional company based in her hometown of Charlottesville, VA. After working as an English teacher in various regions of Italy, she completed her M.A. in Italian Literature at Middlebury College in Florence. Her M.A. thesis, Le connotazioni di Zeno, explored the various critical interpretations of Svevo's novel which are suggested by the protagonist's name. She is a second year student at Brown University with a focus on modern and contemporary Italian literature. Her teaching experience includes English language instruction in Italy and Italian instruction at Brown University. Nicole_Gercke@brown.edu
Stephen Marth
Stephen Marth received a B.A in Art History from the University of Georgia. After working as an English teacher in various regions of Italy, he completed his M.A. in Italian Literature at Middlebury College in Florence. His M.A. thesis, Aldo Palazzeschi and Luigi Pirandello: The Crisis of the Individual and the Therapy of Laughter examined and compared the respective authors’ literary responses to a perceived crisis of the individual around the turn of the century. He is a fifth year student at Brown University with a focus on modern and contemporary Italian literature, modernity, visual culture, and the historical Italian avant-garde. With the guidance of his advisor Massimo Riva and the members of his committee, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, and Walter Adamson (Emory University), he is currently writing his dissertation on Aldo Palazzeschi’s novel, Il Codice di Perelà, read against the backdrop of Italian Futurism and the visual culture of modernity. His teaching experience includes English language instruction in Italy and Italian instruction at Brown University. Stephen_Marth@brown.edu
Karina Mascorro
Karina Mascorro is a second-year graduate student in the Italian Studies Department. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006 with a B.A. in both Psychology and Italian Studies. During the 2004-2005 academic year she studied abroad at the Università di Bologna (Italy) where she completed work in Psychology, Anthropology, and Contemporary Italian Literature. Recently, she attended the 2008 summer session of the Scuola Italiana at Middlebury College. At the age of six Ms. Mascorro emigrated from Mexico to the United States. Her upbringing in a multicultural working class neighborhood in Los Angeles, California inspired her to promote diversity in Education. Before coming to Brown she worked as the program assistant for the Graduate Diversity Program of Outreach and Retention, a resource center for educationally and financially disadvantaged students throughout their academic career at UC Berkeley. Currently, she holds a teaching assistantship in elementary Italian and her academic interests include 20th Century Italian Literature, Migratory Culture, Transnationalism, Hybridity, and Photography. She looks forward to completing a dissertation on the everyday positive cultural import that comes with migration. Karina_Mascorro@brown.edu
Amanda Minervini
Amanda Minervini has a honors Laurea in Lettere from Università di Bari, Italy (2002). At Brown since 2006, her academic interests encompass modern literature, war and Holocaust representations, critical theory, and political philosophy. A Fulbright Fellowship allowed her to start her coursework at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where she earned an M.A. in Comparative Literature (Italian, English, and French) with a special focus on modern literature, cinema, and literary theory (2007). Thanks to the support of the Brown Cogut Center for the Humanities, in the summer of 2008 she attended the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory under the direction of Dominick LaCapra. The following year, she completed one year of exchange study at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.With the supervision of professors Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, David L. Kertzer, and Massimo Riva, she is now completing her dissertation: From Cavalry to Calvary: Representations of St. Francis of Assisi in Twentieth-Century Italy. With the support of theoretical, archival, literary, and visual materials, her dissertation examines the ways in which the figure of St. Francis, declared Italy’s patron saint in 1939, was instrumentalized by Fascism. Known today as symbol of pacifism and brotherhood, during the 1920s and 1930s, the figure of St. Francis was co-opted by Fascists as an incitation to go to war, evoking the principle of self-sacrifice contained in the symbolism of stigmata. Vatican archival documents show how a part of the clergy was supportive of the appropriation. Analyzing the role played by the figure of Francis during Fascism, opens up a further way to gauge the relations between Church and State. The second part of her dissertation discusses filmic representations of St. Francis in films by Roberto Rossellini, Franco Zeffirelli, and Liliana Cavani.Together with Adam Sitze (Amherst College), Amanda is co-translator of political theory essays by Carlo Galli (Università di Bologna). Her translation of Giorgio Agamben’s “Nymphs” appeared in The Philosophy of the Image, Stanford University Press, 2011. An “artistic biography” of St. Francis is forthcoming in Hans Hacke’s Once Upon a Time, Black Dog, 2012. A brief introduction on Roberto Esposito’s work on the “impolitical” is also forthcoming on Diacritics (2012).
Amanda_Minervini@brown.edu
Erica Moretti
Erica Moretti graduated with honors in Contemporary History from the University of Florence, Italy (2005), where she wrote a thesis titled "Il movimento playground vs il metodo Montessori (1913-1915): risposte educative al problema dell’immigrazione." While completing her Laurea, she worked for the History department and collaborated with Boston College in Florence as an instructor for the course "Atlantic Crossings: intersections of Italian and American Modern History."During a fully-funded fellowship at Smith College, she received a Diploma in American Studies (2005). At Smith College she continued working on pedagogical methods designed to assimilate Italian immigrants in the United States. In order to complete her research, she received a fellowship from the University of Florence, providing access to both Columbia University and the Teacher College’s archives. She started her Ph.D. in Italian Studies at Brown University in 2006, and she is currently working on developing her dissertation on the transnational and national influences that shaped the Montessori Method (Dissertation Committee: Prof. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg; Prof. Caroline Castiglione, Provost David Kertzer, and Prof. Massimo Riva). She is also research associate for the Garibaldi Panorama Project at Brown University. She currently teaches Italian language and culture, while pursuing other interests, including modern Italian history, gender studies, and the history of childhood. Erica_Moretti@brown.edu
Mauro Resmini
Mauro Resmini received his BA in Media Studies from the Department of Political Science at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan (Italy) in 2003; then he received his MA (laurea magistralis summa cum laude) in Theory and Techniques of Media Communication – with a specific focus on film theory – from the Department of Literature and Philosophy at the same university in 2006, with a dissertation about the role of the face in contemporary post-noir cinema. After graduation, he worked as a journalist and film critic, and he pursued his collaboration with the academia as a teaching assistant at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore for the “Film Semiology” and “History and Critique of Cinema” classes. He is also one of the contributors of “Segnocinema”, a review of cinema and film studies, for which he wrote various essays since 2005. He is currently enrolled in a special PhD program in Visual Studies, sponsored by the Department of Italian Studies and the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. His research interests include film theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis, contemporary American and Italian cinema, digital cinema and comics. Mauro_Resmini@brown.edu
Michela Ronzani
Michela Ronzani is a second-year graduate student in the Italian Studies Department. She graduated from the University of Ferrara in 2006 with a BA in History of Visual and Performing Arts and in 2007 she completed a MA in Arts Administration at Bocconi University in Milan. During her undergraduate studies she was a TA of Italian at Middlebury College for one year. Before coming to Brown she worked in Milan as booking agent for classical music musicians and orchestras and she was a private teacher of Italian language in New York. Her main academic interest is Italian Opera. Michela_Ronzani@brown.edu