When I was asked by the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT), in an interview, which metaphor best described my teaching experience, I likened teaching to a travel itinerary: while you embark on a boat with a strong sense of direction and commitment, you don’t necessarily know the composition of the traveling group, and the dynamics on board will differ with the travelers with whom you’ll share the journey. And yet, what characterizes a communal travel experience is a profound openness to surprises and a constant preparedness for unexpected turbulences along the way that the group will master together. Upon arrival at the final destination, we can find ourselves transformed, perhaps even unsettled and uprooted, by the journey itself, looking back at the place of departure with different eyes. To create excellent travel conditions, to be inclusive of all the fellow travelers, and to invite them to join the journey in the first place has been among the most rewarding experiences for me at Harvard, the very catalyst for my own intellectual trajectory and my growth as a teacher, adviser, and scholar.

Since I joined Harvard in 2013, I have created and taught ten different courses at all undergraduate and graduate student levels, in Comparative Literature and beyond the department. Courses I teach more frequently include "Cartography, Literature, and the Spatial Turn," "Comparing, Connecting, Compos(t)ing," and "World Cinema," although I equally enjoy teaching courses on interdisciplinary topics ranging from “Rhetoric and Translation” to the “Sophomore Tutorial” to “History of Drama,” and from individual tutorials to the direction of doctoral dissertations. I have co-taught General Education courses (HUM10) with colleagues from across Harvard’s humanities departments and developed new teaching methods specifically geared toward students who consider concentrating in comparative literature (CL102). Along the way, the material I have taught has yielded new research projects while, conversely, my research methods have informed my teaching practice. Since joining Harvard, I have advided graduate students in my capacity as job placement officer and served on dissertation and MA theses committees, at Harvard and across the U.S. and abroad.

Prior to coming to Harvard, I taught at Pace University, NY, where I was an assistant professor in the Modern Languages Department and in Film and Screen Studies (2012-2013), and at the University of Florence, Italy, where I held the position of lecturer in the Department of Modern Philology.