Faculty

Annamaria Bellezza

Distinguished Senior Lecturer

Annamaria Bellezza is the recipient of the 2022 Distinguished Teaching Award, the most prestigious teaching award at the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a BAT (Bachelor in the Art of Teaching) in French from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and pursued her graduate studies in Italian Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

She is the co-author of the textbook Prego, An Invitation to Italian, 4th edition and the intermediate-to-advanced reader Il reale e il possibile. Her main field of research is critical performative...

Rachel Cook

Lecturer, Reading and Composition Coordinator

Rachel Cook is a lecturer and Reading & Composition Coordinator. She is interested in Italian nationalism, Fascism, and the built environment.

Cristina Farronato

Lecturer, Italian Language Coordinator

Cristina Farronato holds a Laurea in Foreign Language and Literatures from the Università di Venezia, Ca’ Foscari, and a PhD in Literature from the University of California, San Diego. She has been Assistant Professor at Colgate University, Lecturer at the University of Southern California, and more recently Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco. She has taught Italian language and literature courses, Italian cinema, and Core Curriculum classes on the making of the modern world and the challenges of modernity.

She is the author of Eco’s Chaosmos: From the Middle...

Mia Fuller

Gladyce Arata Terrill Distinguished Professor of Italian Studies

Please note: On Sabbatical Fall 2024

Mia Fuller is a cultural anthropologist and urban-architectural historian whose research concerns the interplays of physical space with political power. She has published extensively on architecture and city planning in the Italian colonies, winning an International Planning History Society book prize for Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and...

Akash Kumar

Assistant Professor of Italian Studies

Akash Kumar (Ph.D., Columbia University) is a scholar of medieval Italian literature, with particular focus on the history of science and philosophy, Mediterranean studies, and digital humanities. His first book project, Dante’s Elements: Translation and Natural Philosophy from Giacomo da Lentini to the Comedy, explores the confluence of scientific thought and the early lyric tradition that creates a vernacular intellectual identity vital to the writing of Dante’s Commedia.

Current projects include a second book, tentatively titled Boundary Conditions: Chess...

Henrike Christiane Lange

Associate Professor, Italian Studies and History of Art
Italian Studies
History of Art

Henrike Christiane Lange, Ph.D. Yale University 2015, is a historian of art, architecture, and literature. Professor Lange’s interests focus on the late middle ages and the Renaissance, the afterlife of Greek and Roman antiquity, and the historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Lange’s monograph with Cambridge University Press, Giotto’s Arena Chapel and the Triumph of Humility (2023), has received the American Association of Publishers (...

Ramsey McGlazer

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature. Affiliated Associate Professor of Italian Studies
Comparative Literature
Italian Studies

Ramsey McGlazer writes about twentieth-century European and Latin American literature, film, and critical theory. He works in Italian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, with research interests in poetry and poetics, politics and aesthetics, critical carceral studies, and feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic theory.

His first book, Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (Fordham University Press, Lit Z Series, 2020), won the American...

Mairi McLaughlin

Professor of French, Affiliated Professor of Italian Studies
French
Linguistics
Italian Studies

Mairi McLaughlin is Professor of French, an Affiliated Member of the Linguistics Department, and an Affiliated Professor of the Department of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and Translation Studies. Some of the main themes addressed by her work include the relationship between language and the media, language contact, translation as a linguistic variable and speech reporting. Her first book, Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation...

Giuliana Perco

Continuing Lecturer

Giuliana Perco (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University) is a Continuing Lecturer and coordinates our department's language placement exams, our annual Gerald and Beverly Bocciardi Undergraduate Conference, and our peer tutoring program. Before teaching at Berkeley, she...

Diego Pirillo

Professor of Italian Studies; Department Chair; Undergraduate Advisor

Diego Pirillo (Ph.D., Scuola Normale Superiore) is Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where is also affiliated with the History Department. He has been fellow of Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), and his work has been supported by institutions such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Houghton Library, the Newberry Library, the American Philosophical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. His work focuses on Italy, Europe, and the Atlantic world between the Renaissance and the...