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Associate Professor

Annachiara Mariani

(She/Her)

World Languages and Cultu

BIO

Annachiara Mariani is an Associate Professor of Italian. She received her Laurea (BA-MA) in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the Università di Bologna and her PhD in Italian from Rutgers University. Her research interests are in Italian Cinema, National and Trans-National Media Studies, and Italian Theatre. She has authored a book on the Grotesque Theatre and Pirandello (2013). She has also published numerous articles, essays, film reviews, book reviews on Italian Theatre, Cinema, and the interrelation between cinema and literature. She has published a special edition of the journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies on Sorrentino’s films and TV series. She has just published an edited book on Paolo Sorrentino's productions with the University of Chicago Press.
She is currently working on a book-length project on today’s portrayal of the Italian Renaissance through popular culture and television series. Her book focuses on recent television series about the events and personages of the Italian Renaissance, in particular, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Medici and Borgia families. She finds that these series’ affective mode, in conjunction with more explicitly cognitive modes, including music, plays a pivotal role in the acquisition of historical knowledge. The material that she examines suggests that this visual mode of engagement with written history differs from and complements the knowledge acquired through textbooks, traditional monographs, and scholarly research. The analysis leads her to conclude that viewers can better contextualize Renaissance history and some of its protagonists through psychological insight or, as it is otherwise known, historical psychology.

ACADEMIC POSITIONS

  • Assistant Professor of Italian
    The University of Tennessee, MFLL, Knoxville, USA1 Aug 2018

DEGREES

  • Phd in Italian Studies
    Rutgers University, New Brunswick, United States

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