- Professor of Italian & Film Studies | Section Head, Italian Program
- Phone: 401.874.4721
- Email: csama@uri.edu
- Office Location: Swan 106
Biography
Catherine Sama came to Rhode Island to pursue her doctorate at Brown University and–aside from frequent trips to her home-away-from-home in Venice, Italy–she has never left “Little Rhody”. She enjoys teaching a wide range of courses at URI, from Italian language & culture classes to advanced courses in Italian literature and film. Specific areas of focus include early modern Italian women writers; Italian dramatic cinema from Neorealism to the present; genocide in Italian literature & film; Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron”; and the use of online platforms, such as video-chats with native speakers and current world events reported in Italian, to enhance students’ learning experience.
Her current book project (with co-translator Julia Kisacky) is a scholarly edition of Rosalba Carriera’s correspondence in English translation for the “Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” series edited by Margaret King and Al Rabil (Toronto Series) http://www.othervoiceineme.com/othervoice-toronto.html. In the area of Digital Humanities, she is enjoying collaborating on Stanford University’s Grand Tour Explorer project, directed by Giovanna Ceserani.
Research
- Digital Humanities
- Correspondence Networks
- Eighteenth-Century Italian Women Writers and Artists
- Gender Studies
- Teaching & Learning Language & Culture with Online Platforms
Education
- Ph.D. Italian Studies, Brown University, 1995
- B.A., French major, Italian minor, University of Virginia, 1985
Selected Publications
“Going Digital: Re-Searching Connections between Venetian Artist Rosalba Carriera and British Grand Tourists” (forthcoming, on-line), Stanford University Grand Tour Explorer.
“Integrating ‘Talk Abroad’ into an Intermediate Foreign Language Course: Building Learner Autonomy and Engagement Through Video Conversations with Native Speakers,” co-authored with Yu Wu. In Teaching Language and Teaching Literature in Virtual Environments, edited by Maria Luisa Carrió-Pastor (Springer Singapore, 2019): 73-94.
“Access to the ‘Other Voice’: Reading Italian Women Writers in North America,” in La storia di genere in Italia in età moderna (Roma: Viella Editrice, 2014), 197-211. Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, edited by Paula Findlen, Wendy Roworth, and Catherine M. Sama (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
“‘On Canvas and on the Page’:” Women Shaping Culture in Eighteenth-Century Venice,” in Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, edited by Paula Findlen, Wendy Roworth, and Catherine M. Sama (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 125-150; 383-393.
“Luisa Bergalli e le sorelle Carriera: un rapporto d’amicizia e di collaborazione professionale,” in Luisa Bergalli poetessa drammaturga traduttrice critica letteraria, edited by Adriana Chemello (Mirano-Venice: Eidos, 2008), 59-75.
“Liberty, Equality, Frivolity! An Italian Critique of Fashion Periodicals.” Eighteenth-Century Studies vol. 37, no. 3 (2004): 389-414.
Elisabetta Caminer Turra, Selected Writings of an Eighteenth-Century Venetian Woman of Letters. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Catherine M. Sama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
Grants/Fellowships/Awards
- URI Foundation Teaching Excellence Award winner, 2017
- National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, 2014