People
Veronica Vegna, PhD
Director of the Italian Language Program; Languages Across the Curriculum Coordinator; Senior Instructional Professor
Veronica Vegna specializes in teacher training, foreign language acquisition, and contemporary Italian cinema.
Justin Steinberg, PhD
Director of Undergraduate Studies and Italian Undergraduate Adviser; Professor of Italian Literature; Editor-in-Chief, Dante Studies.
Sara Dallavalle, PhD
Coordinator of First-year Courses; Language Advising Contact; Assistant Instructional Professor
Sara Dallavalle specializes in Italian comics studies and language pedagogy.
Leonardo Cabrini, PhD
Study-Abroad Liaison; RSO Advisor; Assistant Instructional Professor
Leonardo Cabrini specializes in Italian cinema, television studies, and popular culture.
Please visit this website for a complete list of RLL Italian faculty and graduate students.
Beatrice Fazio, PhD
Humanities Teaching Fellow
Beatrice Fazio is a teacher and scholar of Renaissance and early modern literature and culture, with a focus on civic humanism, geocriticism, women’s writing, and how early modern texts intersect issues of “national” identity and intellectual tradition.
Alessandro Ludovico Minnucci
Graduate Student Instructor
Alessandro Minnucci is a doctoral students in Italian and his research focuses on contemporary performance poetry and the relation between poetry and the other arts.
Darren Kusar, PhD
Humanities Teaching Fellow
Darren Kusar’s research interests include early modern poetry, opera, voice studies, Renaissance demonology, phenomenology, and wonder tales. Darren is also a classically trained tenor who frequently performs solo and in ensembles in the Chicago area.
Caterina Nicodemo
Graduate Student Instructor
Caterina Nicodemo is a doctoral student in Italian, and her research focuses on the early Italian lyric, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.
Get to know some of the people who made and continue to make our program great!
