I'm a PhD Candidate in Italian, working mainly on post-WWII literature, cinema, and political history, and second language acquisition. After obtaining a BA in Modern Literatures and an MA in Modern Philology, both from the the University of Padova, I worked for two years as a teaching assistant at Bard College (NY).
In my dissertation, I consider how historical events of crucial national importance are turned into fictional narratives – founding myths – and seek to determine how their diachronic re-shaping reflects cultural progress in society. Specifically, I analyze how the founding myth of the Italian Republic - the Resistenza against Nazi-Fascism and subsequent Liberazione - has generated different narrative legacies in literature and cinema, and how the development of these legacies in the 20th and 21st century can be traced and interpreted as a form of mythologization.