As a scholar, I trace the use of media, music and transnational networks within activist movements in Italy. I seek to uncover new historical protagonists, reveal underexamined avenues of cultural exchange, and complicate dominant narratives about Italian identities.

My current book project, Songbook for a Revolution: Popular Culture and the New Left in 1960s Italy, analyzes how an Italian leftist music collective, the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI), used folk music and radical performance to create the soundtrack of 1968. Through over 160 recorded albums and disruptive live shows, the NCI argued that oral histories and lower-class voices offered a radical form of cultural and political expression. My critical history also evaluates the wider tensions of this pivotal moment, including the splintering of traditional political parties, the proliferation of student and worker movements, and the rise of mass culture and television. Using original interviews with NCI members, I also explore how grief of personal loss intertwines with grief of a revolution manqué. You can check out my newest article on the NCI in the Forum for Modern Language Studies here.

I have also published articles on folk music as transatlantic exchange and the anti-fascist and anti-colonialist organizing of Giovanni Pirelli in the journals Popular Music, Modern Italy, and Interventions.

My most recent research extends into gender and sexuality studies. Before coming to Pitt, I collaborated on a project at the University of St. Andrews about transnational AIDS activism in western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Using oral history interviews and archival media, I examined how queer communities harnessed the international circulation of AIDS-related information to produce a counterdiscourse, in Italian translation, that confronted both the virus and its related stigmas. In addition to my forthcoming publications from this project, I co-created the project’s oral history database and comic book, which you can find here.