I am an Assistant Instructional Professor in Italian at the University of Chicago, where I teach language and culture courses at all levels, coordinate the first-year sequence, manage the Italian Program’s website and social media presence, co-organize cultural events, mentor graduate student instructors, and oversee placement and diagnostic assessments.
I hold a master’s degree in Specialized Translation in English and Spanish (IULM University, Milan) and a Ph.D. in Italian Studies from Indiana University (2020), with a focus on Italian comics. My research brings together comics studies, translation studies, and foreign language pedagogy. I have published on Italian comics and publishing culture in venues such as Simultanea and the International Journal of Comic Art. My chapter, “Teaching Italian (with) Comics,” appears in Italian as a Foreign Language: Teaching and Acquisition in Higher Education (Vernon Press, 2023), where I analyze how comics support linguistic development and cultural interpretation in college classrooms. I guest edited a 2024 special issue of Italica devoted to new directions in Italian culture and language pedagogy. My article, “Pino Zac’s Orlando Furioso and the Art of Comics Adaptation,” is forthcoming in The Italianist.
My teaching develops from this intersection of pedagogy, translation, and visual culture. In the elementary sequence, I introduce grammar through sustained work with primary materials – images, short literary excerpts, film clips, music, and comics – so that students learn to analyze context as they build formal accuracy. In my advanced courses, students engage in project-based and multimedia work, develop their public voice in Italian, and explore contemporary social and cultural issues. For example, in Autumn 2025, my students completed a podcast project that required them to script, record, and revise their work, strengthening precision, clarity, and rhetorical control. In 2023, I developed a course on translating Italian comics in which students produced annotated translations and critical commentaries addressing register, the relationship between text and image, and audience experience. I am currently preparing a new course on Italian comics and twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian history, where students will study comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels in their historical contexts and examine print editions to understand the material and cultural conditions of their production and reception.
Alongside my teaching, I contribute to assessment design and curricular development. I designed and implemented the Advanced Proficiency Assessment in Italian with the University of Chicago Language Center. In 2025-2026, with colleagues Celia Bravo and Diana Palenzuela, I received a $7,000 University of Chicago Artificial Intelligence and Education Working Group seed grant to develop AI-supported placement testing tools for Spanish and Italian, with the goal of improving placement accuracy and aligning assessment practices more closely with classroom expectations.
Selected Publications
2025: “Emerging Horizons: New Directions in Italian Culture and Language Pedagogy,” Italica, vol. 101, n. 1, Spring 2024. https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/ital/issue/101/1
2023: “Teaching Italian (with) comics.” Italian as a Foreign Language: Teaching and acquisition in higher education, edited by Alberto Regagliolo, Vernon Press, 2022, pp. 59-86.
2023: “Di isole e di treni: l’impresa fumettistica di Luigi Bernardi.” Un lampo obliquo. Luigi Bernadi, i suoi libri e il suo immaginario, edited by Filippo Milani and Alberto Sebastiani, Biblioteca Umanistica “Ezio Raimondi”, Petali, vol.15, 2022, pp. 63-78. http://amsacta.unibo.it/7122/1/Bernardi_ex_Libris.pdf
2021: “Building Student Communities in Spite of the Pandemic” [co-authored with Viola Ardeni and Karolina Serafin]. Journal of Teaching and Learning with Technology, vol. 10, no. 1, 2021. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/jotlt/article/view/31410/36107
2020: “Alcuni dati sull’andamento dell’editoria fumettistica in Italia tra graphic novel e fumetto seriale.” Simultanea, vol. 1, no. 2, Fall 2020. www.italianpopculture.org/alcuni-dati-sullandamento-delleditoria-fumettistica-in-italia-tra-graphic-novel-e-fumetto-seriale/
2019: “Popular format and auteur format in Italian comics. The case of Magnus.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 21, no. 1, Spring/Summer 2019, pp. 300-328.
Forthcoming * “Pino Zac’s Orlando Furioso and the Art of Comics Adaptation.” The Italianist, vol. 46, no.1.
Invited Talks
2021: “Comics literacy in Italian language courses: combining textual and visual elements to enhance students’ analytical skills.” The Center for The Study of Languages and Cultures Ed Talk. The University of Notre Dame – virtual (19 March).
2021: “Building Student Communities in Spite of the Pandemic.” Reimagining Engagement in Teaching and Learning Faculty Academy on Excellence in Teaching event. Indiana University – virtual (26 February). Co-speaker.
2020: “Luigi Bernardi: L’Isola Trovata e Orient Express.” Luigi Bernardi e l’immaginario pop roundtable. University of Bologna – Bologna (17 January).
Recent courses in RLL
- ITAL 10100 Beginning Elementary Italian I (Autumn 2020, Autumn 2021, Autumn 2022, Autumn 2023, Autumn 2025)
- ITAL 10200 Beginning Elementary Italian II (Winter 2021, Winter 2022, Winter 2023, Winter 2024, Winter 2025, Winter 2026)
- ITAL 10300 Beginning Elementary Italian III (Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2024, Spring 2025, Spring 2026)
- ITAL 20200 Language, History, and Culture II (Winter 2022, Winter 2025)
- ITAL 20300 Language, History, and Culture III (Spring 2021, Spring 2025)
- ITAL 20400 Corso di perfezionamento (Autumn 2020, Autumn 2021, Autumn 2022, Autumn 2023, Autumn 2025)
- ITAL 20650 Translating Italian Comics: Discovering 20th-and 21st-Century Language and Culture (Spring 2023)
- ITAL 20660 Italian Comics: A Century Long (Hi)story (Spring 2026)