Why did you decide to become an Italian major?
When people learn I speak Italian, they often ask me, "How did you choose that language?" In fact I became fascinated with Italy as a young girl, during family trips there. I took all the languages offered by my high school, Latin especially, and branched out to Italian at the local university. When I arrived at Wellesley, I dived into literature courses, and I spent a full year abroad in Bologna, with the ECCO program, while double-majoring in Italian Studies and Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences. This division between "humanities" and "science" still defines my intellectual life, and how I view the world and my place in it.
How did it shape your time at Wellesley?
Apart from my love of language, my hobby during college was caving — speleologia, in Italian. Italy is full of fantastic caves, and I was fortunate enough to meet the local cave explorers, who soon enrolled me in their training program for new cavers. This introduced me to dozens of locals, with whom I’d spend entire weekends, exploring deep inside the misty, marble-filled Apuan Alps in Tuscany. Take it from me that when you’re dangling from a rope in the darkness, depending on people who don’t speak your native language, your Italian has to be pretty darn good. Even now when I speak Italian, I hear the echoes of the accento bolognese. My experience with that community in Italy actually landed me my first post-Wellesley job, as an explorer at Jewel Cave National Monument in South Dakota, the second-longest cave in the world.
How has it influenced your life after Wellesley?
After two years off from school, I was pulled back to academia. I earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics at Cornell University; there, I worked for several years as an Italian TA, using both of my majors for teaching and research simultaneously. My dissertation focused on the Romanian language, which has a lot in common with Italian, and in fact I compared the two via a phonetic study. As a professor in Linguistics and Romance Languages at the University of Georgia, I have new research projects on the sounds of Italian, and using it as my base, I’m adopting a "pan-Romance" approach that is proving fruitful in my career, and enriches my perspective on the world.