My interdisciplinary research is tied to my teaching. Many of the themes I examine in my publications are present in the courses I teach at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center, where I was appointed to the faculty in the Comparative Literature Department in 2011 and where I was Director of the Italian Specialization from 2011 to 2021.

Since the Italian Program at Hunter College is relatively small, I teach the Italian language at all levels, Renaissance Italian and European literature and culture, and modern and contemporary Italian and Italian American literature at the undergraduate and graduate levels (B.A. and M.A.). I am interested in integrating visual and verbal media in my teaching using emotions and emotional codes. I put this pedagogical interest into practice in various courses I taught in-person and online during the pandemic–Italian American Women Writers, in Spring 2021; Italian Women Writers of the 20th and 21st century, in Fall 2020; advanced Italian Grammar, in Fall 2019 and 2020; and Writing and Reading Workshop on Italian Literature, Art, and Film, in Spring 2019. I redesigned the last course, which the Curriculum Committee of the School of Arts and Sciences approved in 2019, for the M.A. students in Italian literature and Italian Education. In this course, students are asked to focus on how stylistic and rhetorical devices help readers/writers interpret texts and how texts communicate their message to the readership/viewership.

I aim to create an osmotic relationship between the outside world and the community of students through the artistic medium we study in class. Students explore, re-elaborate, and ideally bring back what they learn to the outside community and world. Therefore, the student-centered or teacher-centered method gives rise to another pedagogical practice where the community/school is the undisputed protagonist.

On these topics, I presented between 2018 and 2019 papers at conferences, co-organized pedagogical workshops at Hunter College, for which the Italian Program received grants from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I wrote an article for the North-Eastern Modern Language Association Italian Studies Journal in 2020. In particular, the pedagogical workshops and conferences co-organized in 2018 and 2019 intended to create bridges, connections, and networks among visual art, literature, and history disciplines. An important link is between the content-based language learning adopted in secondary schools and colleges in the NYC area and the city’s vast presence of world art and culture–one example is the Frick Collection, which I regularly visited with my classes before the pandemic. Another important link is between secondary education and college teachers of world languages. Secondary education teachers can implement and integrate the vast content resources learned at the college level in their high school classes. This is what the secondary education instructors who attended the pedagogical conferences were invited to do and what several of my TEP (Teacher Education Program) students did in their teaching. They used some of the pedagogical tools acquired in my classes and adapted them in language and culture/literature units with very positive results.