B.A. in Linguistics and Italian Literature, Ph.D. in Linguistics, both at Cornell University.

In graduate school I specialized in historical Romance linguistics and phonology but also studied sociolinguistics and American English dialects, and remain committed to teaching linguistics to non-specialists. I never lost my interest in Italian literature and enjoy teaching it here at RIT (my students especially love Calvino). I taught a freshman writing seminar in linguistics as a graduate student and have been teaching writing ever since. Happily, I can pursue teaching and research in all my areas of interest (linguistics, literature, and writing) in the RIT College of Liberal Arts, an environment that fosters making connections between disciplines. At the October Conference of the New York College English Association, I presented a comparative study of two contemporary Italian works: "Journey Towards Identity in Elio Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia and Antonio Tabucchi's "Notturno indiano." A creative non-fiction piece based on my family's experiences of life in southern Italy during WWII will be published in Voices in Italian Americana: Literary and Cultural Studies. I am currently in the early stages of an interdisciplinary research project that spans linguistics, literature, and cognitive science.

Raddoppiamento Sintattico in Italian: A Synchronic and Diachronic Cross-Dialectical Study. New York. Routledge, 2002