Daisy Ament received her B.A. from U.C. Davis with a double major in comparative literature and Italian. During her time at Davis she completed an Honor’s Thesis titled, “Psicogeografia del modernismo: rappresentazioni di spazio e tempo nelle città italiane di Canti orfici e Fantasmi romani” where she explored an emerging a-temporal experience of city life and repressed utopian desires.
Her academic interests primarily include representations of urban space, metaphysical art and architecture, past and present conceptions of utopia, and transnationalism.
Lauren Bartone is a PhD student in Italian Studies with a designated emphasis in folklore.
Her background as a visual artist strongly informs her approach to studying Italian culture. Before joining the Department of Italian Studies at Berkeley, she completed a B.A. in Fine Art at UCLA, followed by an M.A. in Education at UC Berkeley, and an M.F.A. at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Previous work in collaborative map making, community dialogue, and participatory art forms led to her project A City in Maps, completed as the artist in residence at the de Young Museum of Art...
Simo Cocco is a PhD student in the Department of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley. They are interested in Italian identity, particularly LGBT identities, Fascism, postcolonialism, and Italian contemporary activist movements.
They received their B.A. from UC Berkeley with a double major in Italian Studies (Honors) and Comparative Literature with a focus on Italian, Spanish, and English language literatures.
Blake De Luca [he/they], 2022, is a PhD student in the Department of Italian Studies.
Initially focused on time as an abstract entity, as a philosophical concept and in its relation to spatiality throughout the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods in Italy (1300-1600), Blake’s research has shifted through their exposure to queer studies and critical theory.
Their new projected path through the program applies queer studies to Early Modern Italy, through the study of the representation of intersex and genderqueer figures in art and literature, notably the representations of...
Mariagrazia is currently writing her dissertation on translingualism across Italian contexts. Inspired by the Somali writer Ali Mumin Ahad’s definition of “italiano di ritorno” —the “indigenized” language of postcolonial Italian writers— Mariagrazia reflects on how languages move across and beyond borders, while at the same time prompting us to reconsider and redefine the very notion of “border” and national identity.
Related to her dissertation topic, Mariagrazia recently contributed a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism (2021), edited by Professors Steven...
Anna Dini is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at University of California, Berkeley. She writes about frame tale collections, and her dissertation is entitled The Role of Performance in the Decameron and the Thousand and One Nights. Her interests include narratology, orality, gender, and the question of authorship. Her research brings together medieval Italian literature and its relationship to the Arabic tradition, performance theory, and Mediterranean studies.
While at UC Berkeley, Anna has taught for the Department of Comparative...
