Born in an Italian-Brazilian family in São Paulo, Brazil, different languages and cultures have always been part of my life. One can get to know different cultures, customs, and peoples through language, so I decided to work professionally with it and help students open their worlds to these different realities. In 2010 I received a BA in Languages and Literature - Portuguese and English from the Universidade Federal de São Carlos. The following year I received a Fulbright scholarship to teach Portuguese in the United States, and after that I earned both an MA and a PhD in Romance Languages - Portuguese and Spanish from the University of Georgia. While at the University of Georgia I created the magazine Fala Aí, in which students and speakers of Portuguese had the opportunity to learn more about and share their knowledge of the Lusophone world. At UChicago I am the editor-in-chief of Revista Væranda
Teaching Portuguese and Spanish at the University of Chicago since 2020, I look for opportunities to bring authentic experiences with language and culture into the classroom by means of online videos, podcasts, video games etc. I am currently working on a project to develop Virtual-Reality-enabled materials to be used in Portuguese and Spanish classes at UChicago.
I am also interested in the presence and the perception of immigration in narrative literature, mainly Italian immigration in Argentina and Brazil in late 19th and early 20th centuries. I pay special attention to how this immigration is represented in the literature produced in the cities of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and São Paulo, Brazil. I also study the different ways this type of immigration is represented in different media, such as film and newspapers, as well as other genres in literature, and the relation it has with the creation of national identity.
Recent courses in RLL
- PORT 10100 Beginning Elementary Portuguese I (Autumn 2020, Autumn 2021, Autumn 2022, Autumn 2023)
- PORT 10200 Beginning Elementary Portuguese II (Winter 2021, Winter 2022, Winter 2023, Spring 2023, Winter 2024)
- PORT 10300 Beginning Elementary Portuguese III (Spring 2021, Spring 2024)
- PORT 14500 Portuguese for the Professions: Intensive Business Portuguese (Spring 2021, Spring 2024)
- PORT 20500 Cultura do Mundo Lusófono (Winter 2022)
- SPAN 10100 Beginning Elementary Spanish II (Autumn 2020, Autumn 2022)
- SPAN 10200 Beginning Elementary Spanish II (Winter 2021, Winter 2023)
- SPAN 10300 Beginning Elementary Spanish III (Winter 2021, Spring 2021)
- SPAN 20100 Spanish Language, History, and Culture I (Autumn 2021, Winter 2022, Autumn 2023)
- SPAN 20102 Language, History, and Culture for Heritage Speakers I (Winter 2024)