Monica Martinelli (University of Connecticut), for the project Promoting Civic Mindedness Through Italian Racialized Literature.

Monica Martinelli holds an M.A. degree from the multi-university master’s program “Crossways in Cultural Narratives” at the University of St Andrews, Santiago de Compostela, and Poznań, and is currently a Ph.D. student in Applied Linguistics with Italian and a Graduate Fellow in the Team-TERRA Training Program at the University of Connecticut. She has been an instructor for the Neag School of Education and previously taught all levels of Italian, as well as Italian culture and cinema and Cognitive Sciences at UConn. She also works as a translator to English, Italian and Italian Mirandolese dialect. Her research focuses on the expansion of the Italian literary canon to encompass female and racialized authors.