I am an Associate Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas Austin. After graduating college, I lived in Rome for several years while employed at an American press bureau within the Vatican. This formative experience led to my lifelong passion for Italian culture, its diverse internal geographies, and complex relationship to modernity.
My research approaches Italy from the wider vantage point of its modern empire-state and uncovers the complex transnational, colonial, and postcolonial histories that have accompanied Italy since its 1861 unification. This postcolonial frame enables me to analyze and reflect on both Italy’s relationship to Europe, and European identity, as well as its relationship to Asia and Africa and to other, non-European identities. In my first book, Italy’s Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean, 1895-1945 (Liverpool University Press, 2020), I rethinks modern Italian history and culture, including the twenty years of fascist dictatorship, through the lens of its overseas empire. It locates a new paradigm for studying colonialism by revealing the history of “Mediterranean-ness” (Mediterraneità) in Italian culture.
My PhD training and background was in interdisciplinary methods of research and humanistic inquiry. As an Italianist, I use my background in literary studies to scrutinize key protagonists that have helped shape Italian culture’s relationship to the Mediterranean and the globe. As an historian, I interrogate archival documents, diplomacy, and state-local interactions that can attest to the conditions of coloniality and postcoloniality that may reside in governance as well as in lived experience and everyday life.