Italian Faculty

Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature

Gian Maria Annovi’s research spans the twentieth through twenty-first centuries, with particular emphasis on the history and presence of the avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, experimentalism, and the relations between literary and other arts in Italy. His interests include film studies, critical thought, and gender and sexuality studies. His most recent book Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship (Columbia UP, 2017) received the Ennio Flaiano International Prize for Italian Studies. His most recent works in progress are a book tentatively titled “Late Future: Politics, Materiality, and the End of Futurism,” and a monograph on Italian poet Nanni Balestrini.

Keywords: Avant-garde; neo-avant-garde; Italian cinema; Italian poetry; Pier Paolo Pasolini; experimentalism; queer; gender and sexuality.

Professor of Italian, Comparative Literature and English

Tita Rosenthal is a literary and social historian of early-modern Italy. Her interests include women writers of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Venice, courtesan poets, fashion and material culture, costume books, illustrated alba amicorum, and gender and sexuality in the early modern period in Europe. She is the co-translator (with Ann R. Jones) of Veronica Franco: Poems and Selected Letters (U of Chicago P, 1998) and The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Cesare Vecellio’s Costume Book 1590/1598 (Thames and Hudson, 2008). She is currently working on the fashions of women at court in renaissance Italy.

Keywords: Italian Renaissance; social history; sixteenth and seventeenth-century Venetian women writers; fashion history; costume books; material culture; illustrated album amicorum; women at court; gender and sexuality

Associate Professor (Teaching) of Italian

Alessio Filippi’s research interests include food, body, sins in the Church in medieval Italy; Christianity, medieval philosophy; Italian medieval “novelle” (from Boccaccio to mid XV century; female saints in XIII-XIV centuries Tuscany. He is co-organizer of the annual one-day Italian Language Teacher’s Workshop (ILT) whose focus is to provide a venue for Italian basic language instructors to exchange ideas and strategies on the teaching of Italian.

Keywords: Food, the body, and sins in the Church in medieval Italy; female saints in XIII-XIV centuries Tuscany; WWI Italian literature; Renaissance cookery; XIX-XX Centuries Italian history, politics and numismatics.

Associate Professor (Teaching) of Italian

James M. Fortney is Director of the Italian Basic Language Program at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.  In addition to teaching an Accelerated Italian course for Speakers of Spanish and other Romance Languages, he teaches a general education course on contemporary Italian fiction in translation.  Recent projects that he has worked on include directing and teaching language courses on USC’s Maymester in Rome held at the LUISS Guido Carli University campus and on USC’s Julymester in the Sicilian town Cefalù in Italy.  His work has contributed to an internship course and opportunities with Italian owned and operated businesses in Los Angles for USC students of Italian thanks to his department’s affiliation with the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce West.   He is collaborating with the Università per Stranieri di Siena to provide Italian language training and other opportunities for instructors of Italian.  Finally, he is currently the  interim head editor for AATI’s Newsletter.

Keywords: language pedagogy, second language acquisition, cultural immersion, study abroad, contemporary Italian literature and cinema

Associate Professor (Teaching) of Italian

Antonio Idini’s interests include Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy (Italian and English); Italian literature; Native American literature; Detective Fiction; Contemporary Cinema; Poetry. His translation into Italian of Acoma author Simon Ortiz’ Fight Back was published with an introductory essay by the publisher Quattroventi.

Keywords: Italian Basic Language; World Literatures; Natural and Artificial Languages; Italophone Writers.

Associate Professor (Teaching) of Italian

Francesca Leardini conducts research in the areas of Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (early Italian prose and poetry; Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca), and in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature (Leopardi, Verga, Pirandello, Ungaretti, Palazzeschi, Landolfi).

Francesca Ricciardelli conducts research in Applied Linguistics, Italian Studies, Multilingualism and Second Language Acquisition. Her main interests are in Reading and Listening Strategies in Italian and Intercomprehension of the Romance Languages.