Professor of Italian Studies; Department Chair; Undergraduate Advisor (on leave April 1 - June 30, 2025)
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...
Nicole Trigg is a poet, translator, and scholar of feminist and queer philosophies and methodologies.
Her primary area of inquiry is postwar Italian cultural and intellectual production, with special emphasis on the oeuvre of Carla Lonzi (1931–1982). Key research interests include the politics of difference, creative practices and decolonization, and theorizing collectivity.
Associate Professor of Italian Studies; Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair of Italian Literature; Graduate Advisor
Rhiannon Noel Welch works on modern Italian literature, film, and critical theory. Her first book, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy, reads a range of canonical and lesser-known texts through the lens of biopolitics in order to demonstrate how race and colonialism have long been central to Italian modernity and national culture, rather than a fascist aberration or a contemporary phenomenon resulting from immigration.
Her current book project, Crisis and the Aesthetics of Deceleration, examines recurring figures of deceleration, dilation, and/or slowness...
