About
With over 12 years of teaching experience, I am trained in Italian, Spanish, and Classical Studies. Besides the instruction of Romance languages, including accelerated Italian for Spanish speakers, I have taught general education courses focused on Italian literature and culture, such as Dante’s Commedia, Italian Culture, and college reading and composition.
As a researcher, I study the rise and evolution of the novella tradition, from Late Medieval to Early Modern works, against prevalent theories of authorship and genre by focusing on authorial vulnerabilities, specifically authorial shame(lessness), and the intersection between translation, imitation, and originality. My current work traces the revival of Boccaccio’s authorial personas in his collection of novellas, the Decameron (c. 1352): as women’s best friend and as translator of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (2nd century AD). I evince that Boccaccio’s modest authorial personas are strategic in elevating a subaltern genre such as the novella and that these strategies are then revived in Giulia Bigolina’s Urania (ca. 1552) and in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote Book II (1615) for their respective authorial agendas.
As scholar-activist, I engage my teaching and research with current social issues about power, race, identity, and disguised misogyny; see, for instance, “Women Bridled and Unbridled: Contagions of Shame and Maladies of Governance in the Decameron” (California Italian Studies, 2022). I have also collaborated with cultural and activist projects through my work as editor, writer, and translator, such as my essay contribution “Italian” in The Languages of Berkeley: An Online Exhibition (2020) and translation of poems by detainee allies, published in Dignity Not Detention: An Anthology of Poems from Detainees and Allies (2021).
For fun and relaxation, I enjoy playing beach volleyball, salsa dancing, napping, hiking, and eating with friends and family.
