Brenda Rosado, Ph.D. 2023

Dissertation: “Rethinking the Novella: Immodest Modesties and Shameless Authorships”

Zachary Bekowies, Ph.D. 2023

Dissertation: “Cultic Constructions: A Visual Construction Grammar Approach to the Cult of Personality in Fascist Italy and Communist Romania”

Rachel Cook, Ph.D. 2023

Dissertation: “Fascist Constructs: Economics, Aesthetics, and the Making of a New Via Roma in Turin”

Currently: Reading and Composition Coordinator for the Department of Italian Studies, UC Berkeley

Kristen Keach, Ph.D. 2022

Dissertation: “The Italian Poetic Triumvirate Realized: Visualizing the ‘Trionfi’ of the ‘tre corone’”

Currently: Instructor of Italian, James Madison University

Matthew Mason, Ph.D. 2022

Dissertation: “Bold Fantasy: The Macaronic Epic of Teofilo Folengo Between Ariosto and Rabelais”

Elisa Russian, Ph.D. 2021

Dissertation: “Situating Lives: Autobiography and Social Critique in Contemporary France and Italy”

Currently: Postdoctoral Fellow in the Romance Studies Department, University of Zurich and Lecturer in Italian Studies, University of Basel

Kate Driscoll, Ph.D. 2020

Dissertation: “Tasso among the Muses: Reading and Writing Women in Early Modern Italy”

Currently: Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University

Margherita Ghetti, Ph.D. 2019

Dissertation: “The Illusion of America: Seriality Across Media in Italian Cinema from Fascism to the Economic Miracle (1932-1968)”

Chiara Cecchelli, Ph.D. 2018

Dissertation: “We Humans, We Cyborgs: Rethinking Anthropocentrism in Postwar Italian Literature”

Emily Rabiner, Ph.D. 2017

Dissertation: “The Decadent Renaissance: The Antimodern Seductions of Gabriele D’Annunzio, Walter Pater, and Vernon Lee”

Currently: Communications and Student Engagement Coordinator for UC Berkeley Arts & Humanities

Jennifer Mackenzie, Ph.D. 2017

Dissertation: “Renaissance Heraldry”

Bianca Facchini, Ph.D. 2017

Dissertation: “Rereading Lucan: Reception(s) of the Bellum Civile in Fourteenth-Century Italy”

Currently: assegnista di ricerca (Research Fellow) at the University of Bologna

Rossella Carbotti, Ph.D. 2015

Dissertation: “Of Ghosts and Survivors: The History and Memory of 1968 in Italy”

Marina Romani, Ph.D. 2015

Dissertation: “Between Soundtrack and Performance: Music and History in Italian Film Melodrama, 1940-2010”

Currently: Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, UC Berkeley
Co-Founder and Principal, Cultura et alia
Personal Website: http://www.marinaromani.org/

Sole Anatrone, Ph.D. 2015

Dissertation: “Finding Feminist Affect in Italian Literature: From Sibilla Aleramo to Rossana Campo, 1906-2012”

Currently: Assistant Professor of Italian, Vassar College

Kate Noson, Ph.D. 2015

Dissertation: “Mermaid without a Tale: Disability, Sexuality, and the Limits of Discourse in Italian Narrative (1975-2009)”

Currently: Program Coordinator at the Center for Change in Transition Services at Seattle University

Francesca Pomara, Ph.D. 2015

Dissertation: “Historical Knowing and Creative Politics in Machiavelli and Vico”

Avy Valladares, Ph.D. 2015

Dissertation: “Picturing Color in Italian Cinema”

Currently: Faculty, Berkeley City College and Graduate Student Services Advisor for Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

Christopher Atwood, Ph.D. 2014

Dissertation: “In a Queer Place in Time: Fictions of Belonging in Italy 1890-2010”

Currently: Director of Marketing at See Italy Travel

Brandon Schneider, Ph.D. 2014

Dissertation: “Berlusconi between Politics and Popular Culture”

Currently: Communications, Events, and Student Affairs Coordinator, The Consortium for Interdisciplinary Research (CIR) University of California, Berkeley

Marco Prina, Ph.D. 2014

Dissertation: “Dante and the Florentine Chronicles”

Currently: Faculty, Lipscomb University in Florence

Leslie Elwell, Ph.D. 2013

Dissertation: “Italian Female Epistemologies Beyond ‘The Scene of the Crime’ ”

Scott Millspaugh, Ph.D. 2013

Dissertation: “Sermo absentium: Rhetoric, Epistolarity, and the Emergence of Italian Literary Culture”

Currently: Learning Experience Designer, University of Colorado, Boulder

Marco Purpura, Ph.D. 2013

Dissertation: “Immigration and Racial Masquerade: Narratives of Passing and Posing in Contemporary Italian Media.”

Currently: Docente, Istituto Piamarta, Brescia

Jonathan Combs-Schilling, Ph.D. 2012

Dissertation: “Pastoral at the Boundaries: The Hybridization of Genre in the Fourteenth-Century Italian Eclogue Revival”

Currently: Associate Professor of Italian, Ohio State University

Rebecca Falkoff, Ph.D. 2012

Dissertation: “After Autarchy: Male Subjectivity from Carlo Emilio Gadda to the Gruppo ’63”

Currently: Assistant Professor, University of Texas, Austin

Janaya Lasker Ferretti, Ph.D. 2012

Dissertation: “Between Word and Image: Women Futurists and Parole in liberta’, 1914-1924″

Currently: Lecturer, University of Michigan

Anthony Martire, Ph.D. 2012

Dissertation: “La comunità mutilata: Embodiment, Corporeality, and the Reconstruction of the Italian Body- Politic in the Works of F.T. Marinetti and Gabriele D’Annunzio, 1909-1920”

Currently: Upper School Division Coordinator at La Scuola d’Italia Guglielmo Marconi, New York

Fabiana Woodfin, Ph.D. 2011

Dissertation: “Spaesati d’Italia: Emigration in Italian National Identity Construction From Postwar to Economic Miracle”

Currently: Lecturer in Communication and English, University of Maryland

Marisa Escolar, Ph.D. 2010

Dissertation: “Contaminating Conversions: Narrating Censorship, Translation, Fascism”

Currently: Writer and editor

Sara Russell, Ph.D. 2010

Dissertation: “Courtship, Violence and the Formation of Marriage in the Early Modern Italian Novella Tradition”

Currently: Nutritional Therapy Practitioner residing in Tuscany buildnurturerestore.com

Maurizio Vito, Ph.D. 2009

Dissertation: “Sea and Land, Collectivity and Individual: Metaphors at Odds in the Political Field”

Currently: Lecturer, University of Oklahoma

Amyrose McCue Gill, Ph.D. 2008

Dissertation: “The Possibility of Friendship: Conceptions and Representations of Married Life in Italian Renaissance Literature”

Currently: Adjunct Lecturer in Italian, Santa Clara University

Karina Xavier, Ph.D. 2008

Dissertation: “Rescuing Rome: Identity and Legacy in Sixteenth-Century Italian and Spanish Literature”

Currently: Manager, MIT- Brazil

Aileen Astorga Feng, Ph.D. 2008

Dissertation: “From Poetry to Politics: Petrarchism as Discursive Formation in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy”

Currently: Associate Professor of Italian, University of Arizona

Jessica Otey, Ph.D. 2008

Dissertation: “Tragedy as Encounter: Politics, Intertextuality and Modern Italian Drama”

Rhiannon Noel Welch, Ph.D. 2008

Dissertation: “Under the Shadow of Our Flag: Race and (Re)productivity in Liberal Italy”

Currently: Associate Professor of Italian Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Angela Matilde Capodivacca, Ph.D. 2007

Dissertation: “Curiosity and the Trials of the Modern Imagination”

Silvia Valisa, Ph.D. 2007

Dissertation: “Dissonant Vehicles of Gender: The Ideology of Character from Alessandro Manzoni to Elsa Morante”

Currently: Associate Professor of Italian, Florida State University

Stephanie Malia Hom, Ph.D. 2007

Dissertation: “Destination Italy: Tourism, Colonialism, and the Modern Italian Nation-State, 1861-1947”

Currently: Associate Professor of Transnational Italian Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Tamao Nakahara, Ph.D. 2005

Dissertation: “Bawdy Tales and Veils: The Exploitation of Sex in Post-War Italian Cinema (1949-1979)”

Cosetta Seno Reed, Ph.D. 2005

Dissertation: “Realism versus Utopianism: The Moral Perspective of Anna Maria Ortese”

Currently: Associate Professor of Italian, University of Colorado, Boulder

Marco Ruffini, Ph.D. 2004

Dissertation: “Art without Author: The Death of Michelangelo and Vasari’s Lives”

Currently: Professore Associato, Storia dell’arte e dello spettacolo, Università di Roma, La Sapienza

Susan Gaylard, Ph.D. 2004

Dissertation: “Shifty Men Writing Monuments: Creating a Permanent Self in Early Modern Italian Literature”

Currently: Associate Professor of Italian, University of Washington

Irene Zanini-Cordi, Ph.D. 2004

Dissertation: “La donna abbandonata nella letteratura italiana”

Currently: Associate Professor of Italian, Florida State University

Eleonora Stoppino, Ph.D. 2003

Dissertation: “Ariosto medievale: Textual and Sexual Genealogies in Orlando Furioso”

Currently: Associate Professor of Italian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Claudia Karagoz, Ph.D. 2002

Dissertation: “‘Amori Molesti’: The Mother-Daughter Relationship in Contemporary Italian Women’s Writing”

Currently: Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, St. Louis University

Nella Nencini, Ph.D. 2001

Dissertation: “Tempering and Temperament in Italian Pastoral Drama of the Late Cinquecento”

Currently: Safari Guide in Kenya

Robert Rushing, Ph.D., 1998

Dissertation: “Writing without End : Epistemology in Italo Calvino and Carlo Emilio Gadda”

Currently: Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

Elizabeth Leake, Ph.D. 1998

Dissertation: “Regret and Reinvention : Ignazio Silone’s Early Narrative”

Currently: Professor of Italian, Department of Italian, Columbia University

Vicki deMara, Ph.D. 1996

Dissertation: “The Pastoral Pause in the Midst of the Hunt”

Currently: Independent scholar and author

Joan Saccuman, Ph.D. 1996

Dissertation, “Ariosto and the Comic”

Lori J. Ultsch, Ph.D. 1996

Dissertation: “The Giovin Signore Revisited : Narratives of Cicisbeism”

Currently: Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Hofstra University

Margaret Gallucci, Ph.D., 1995

Dissertation: “The Unexamined Life of Benvenuto Cellini: Poetic Deviation & Sexual Transgression in Sixteenth-Century Italy”

Richard Guidotti, Ph.D. 1995

Dissertation: “Deceivers, Credulous Skeptics, and Believers: Historical, Fictional and Hermetic Identity-Development of Authors and Characters in Boncompagno da Signa, Salimbene da Parma, Dante and Boccaccio”

Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D. 1994

Dissertation: “Fascism, Film and Female Subjectivity: The Case of Italian Cinema, 1936-1943”

Currently: Dean of the School of Communication and Arts, Marist College