Tatiana Avesani (they/them/their)
Tatiana Avesani is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies program working between the fields of Classics and Italian Studies at Johns Hopkins University. They received their BA at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano and their MA from New York University before coming to Johns Hopkins University. Tatiana’s research has mainly focused on analyzing the relationship between language and identity in the Italian Renaissance. They’ve explored the ways in which vernacular and Neo-Latin literary production influenced each other in the development of Italian language at a time of political and cultural instability. More recently, Tatiana’s interests have been directed towards the study of queer and trans theory in relation to Italy’s Early Modern literary production. Specifically, that has led them to explore the influence of Latin and Greek literature and mythology on the Italian Renaissance.
Claudia Calabresi (she/they)
After a bachelor’s degree in Classical Studies, Claudia Calabresi earned her M.A. in 2022 at the faculty of Communication and Media’s Culture at the University of Turin, Italy, with a dissertation titled “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess. Cinema, sociosemiotics, science fiction and feminisms”. He research is based upon the experimentation of a “hybrid” sociosemiotic and feminist analysis towards the gender-based discrimination and violence dynamics enacted in the science fictional, Western contemporary cinematography, and the theorisation of a critical gaze which could provide an effective counterpart to the male gaze by unraveling its mechanisms and vulnerabilities. The methodological theory offered by the analysis would seek to combine the sociosemiotics theory’s model developed by the authors Guido Ferraro and Antonio Santangelo with the gender studies focused on the semiotic field elaborated by the authors Cristina Demaria, Federica Turco, Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, Mary Ann Doane, Laura Mulvey and Donna J. Haraway. At Johns Hopkins, Calabresi aims to offer through this research a new perspective towards cross-sectional contexts of semio-feminist critics, culture, activism.
Giulia Caleò
Giulia Caleò earned her Bachelor’s degree in Modern Literature in 2020 from the University of Padua, with a thesis in Dante Philology focusing on the theme of the salvation of pagans in “Paradiso,” Cantos XIX-XX. She continued her exploration of marginal literary voices by obtaining a Master’s degree in Modern Philology in 2023, also from the University of Padua, graduating cum laude. Her thesis in Italian Literature and Gender Studies addressed the origins of female writing in the Veneto region of Italy between the 15th and 16th centuries. She examined various literary genres, including humanistic dialogue, books of letters, chapters in terza rima, and poetic songbooks with love rhymes, analyzing the relationship between male and female writers and the dynamics of evasion/adherence to established norms by Venetian female authors. She highlighted the performative and theatrical elements in their texts. The authors she studied in detail include Isotta Nogarola, Maria Savorgnan, Gaspara Stampa, and Veronica Franco. She also participated in a dance philology research project, aiming to recover the original choreographic scores of significant 19th-century ballets.
At Hopkins, she intends to deepen these research perspectives by studying female authors who wrote directly for the theater. She is particularly interested in the relationship between writing and performing arts, from a trans-historical perspective that considers potential parallels between modern and contemporary literary productions by Italian women authors over time. Her research interests include Comparative Literatures, Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature, Women’s and Gender Studies, Women’s Writing, and studies in theater and dance.
Marta Cerreti
Marta Cerreti received her B.A. and a M.A. in Philosophy from Sapienza Università di Roma. In her dissertation titled Feeling a Stranger at Home: An Itinerary Between Philosophy and Literature, Marta explored the theme of recognition. At Hopkins, Marta investigates the link between narrativity and identity in Contemporary literary texts, working at the intersection between Philosophy and Italian Studies. Her research focuses on non-traditional autobiographies, collective writing, and autofiction as feminist genres.
She wrote on Teresa Ciabatti, Igiaba Scego and Adriana Cavarero, Gadda and Hegel, and on the feminist documentary Processo per stupro. She is currently working on the impact that the ecological and feminist revolution in Rojava had on Italy.
At Hopkins, Marta is affiliated with the Program for the Study of Women Gender and Sexuality and the Center for Advanced Media Studies. She is also in the graduate committee for both the Hopkins-Yale Graduate symposium for Italian Studies and the Stanford-Hopkins Philosophy & Literature Graduate Conference.
Martina Franzini
Martina Franzini is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. She earned a BA in Lettere Moderne from the Università degli Studi di Milano and a MA in Italian Studies from Boston College, with a thesis discussing the relationship between the Latin poet Statius and Dante’s poetic value. During the 2023-2024 Academic year, she was a Fellow at the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance. She also participated in Paleography Seminars organized by the Medici Archive Project and the American Boccaccio Association, held between libraries in Rome and Florence. She is currently one of the representatives of the Dante Society of America Graduate Group.
Her research interests include Medieval Literature, History of the Book, and Environmental Studies. Her dissertation project focuses on trees and arboreal metaphors in Dante’s Commedia.
Giordana De Rossi
Giordana De Rossi earned a B.A. (Laurea Triennale) in Philosophy at the Università degli Studi di Padova and, subsequently, received her M.A. in Italian Studies at Boston College, where she was also a teaching fellow of intermediate Italian language. Giordana’s MA thesis titled “Il Volgare Illustre come Risposta all’Esilio: La Lingua e la Metafora della Luce nel Libro I del De Vulgari Eloquentia” (Dante’s Illustrious Vernacularas a Response to Exile: The Language and the Metaphor of Light in Book I of the De Vulgari Eloquentia.) analyzes the relationship between Dante’s exile and his theorization of the illustrious vernacular, and demonstrates that the exiled-Dante aimed to promote a new image of himself as that of a linguistic auctoritas.
Her current research focuses on the influx of the Aristotelianism in the Middle Ages with a focus on the metaphor of light, in particular in the prose works of Dante Alighieri. A further area of interest considers the Questione della Lingua in the Italian Renaissance and the usage of mathematical language in Leon Battista Alberti’s works.
Gianluca Giuseffi
Gianluca Giuseffi Grippa attained a bachelor’s degree in Humanities (Literature, history and philosophy) in 2019 and a master’s degree in Modern Literature in 2021, with honors, at the University of Milan. About the dissertations: the former analyzed the paradigm shift of modern literature through the work of Walter Benjamin; the latter focused on italian industrial literature, highlighting Alberto Bellocchio’s Sirena Operaia and the historical, social and political background of the late twentieth century. Other fields of interest: contemporary literature, literary theory, continental philosophy, philosophy of logic and language, environmental studies, cinema, magazines and periodical publishing, avant-garde, underground movements, music, noise.
Chiara Petrocchi
Chiara Petrocchi received a bachelor’s degree in Italian Literature from the University of Roma Tre (2020) and a master’s degree in Italian Studies from the University of Bologna (2023) with honors. During her BA she won a scholarship to participate in the Erasmus exchange program and spent six months at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France. In her master dissertation Narrating Contact. Metonymy and the Signification of the Body in Elena Ferrante and Fabrizia Ramondino she employs rhetorical, literary and feminist studies to investigate how metonymy is used in L’amore molesto, Althénopis and Guerra d’infanzia e di Spagna to give a powerful narrative role to the body, specifically to physical interactions and sensorial perceptions. At Hopkins she would like to deepen such research perspectives, focusing on the interaction between gender, bodily expression and stylistic strategies in the Italian novel from the 20th and 21st centuries. Her research interests include Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature, Women’s and Gender Studies, Women’s Writing, Narrative Theory and Rhetorical Studies.
Silvia Raimondi
Silvia Raimondi earned her Bachelor’s degree (2015) and Master’s degree (2016), both with honors, in Italian Language and Literature at the University of Roma Tre. After receiving these degrees, she taught Italian and history in a school in the city of Como (Italy) and she obtained the DITALS certification, to teach Italian as a Foreign Language, from the Università per Stranieri di Siena. She has published articles in the field of literature and linguistics with a focus on the representation of female characters in Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. At Hopkins, her work centers itself on epic and chivalric poems of the Italian Renaissance. Specifically, she analyzes the role that marginal elements, such as hair, clothes, accessories, and jewelry, play in the construction of women’s gender and social identities in Pulci’s Morgante, Boairdo’s L’Inamoramento de Orlando, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, and Fonte’s Floridoro. She is also interested in contemporary literature, cinema, and gender studies.
Mackenzie Tygh
Mackenzie Tygh earned her B.S. in Physics (2023) from Haverford College. Having been trained in a liberal arts context, she is committed to new forms of interdisciplinary engagement between the sciences and the humanities. Her undergraduate thesis, “Sacred-Secular Dialectics in Spacetime: Medieval and Modern Notions of Causality in Dante’s Paradiso”, explored the scientific phenomena in the cosmology of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy through the lens of modern physics, including special and general relativity. After receiving her Bachelor’s degree, she taught Math to adult learners pursuing their GED in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and English as a Foreign Language to high school students in Bordeaux, France. At Hopkins, Mackenzie aims to promote dialogue and collaboration between scientists, literary scholars, theologians, and philosophers in the field of Dante Studies and beyond.
Samuel Zawacki
Samuel Zawacki is a PhD candidate in Italian literature at Johns Hopkins University. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Italian and Linguistics (2018) and a Master’s degree in Italian literature (2019) from New York University. While at NYU he earned grants from the D’agostino Fund and the Dean’s Undergraduate Research Fund, departmental honors, and the Guido Cavalcanti Award for excellence in Italian. In his dissertation project “Queer Lies: Truth, Identity, and Dissimulation in Italian Trans Auto-Narration,” Samuel explores the performance of trans identity and the strategic deployment of dissimulation and self-misrepresentation in trans-authored works of memoir and autofiction. His research interests include contemporary Italian literature, film, critical theory, feminist and gender studies, trans theory, and autobiography studies. Additionally, he is currently completing a full-length translation of Romina Cecconi’s Io, la “Romanina” as part of a larger project to make Italian trans narratives accessible (and teachable) in the anglophone context and he has served as Assistant Editor to the Italian edition of Modern Language Notes since 2019.