Lecturer in Italian
Alberto Iozzia entered American academia almost by chance in 2010, as a Teaching Assistant of Italian at Oberlin College, in Ohio. Since then, he has been teaching all levels of Italian language, from elementary courses to advanced content classes. He earned his PhD from Rutgers University in 2018, defending a dissertation on the apocalypse in Italian cinema and literature, and his research indeed focuses on speculative fiction and on post-apocalyptic literature and film.
His publications include a study of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron as the secular archetype of post-apocalyptic narrative and a work on Massimo Bontempelli’s short story Cataclisma (1924) that explores the role of the five senses in the genre, but his secondary field of studies is Italian theater, with a focus on modern Italian theater and on Teatro di Narrazione.
He has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of Italian cinema and on Italian film genres, and courses of Italian theater and of Italian language through theater. The students of his 2023 Italian Theater Workshop at the University of Pittsburgh were awarded the 2022 Giuseppe Velli Prize by the American Boccaccio Association for Best Creative Work inspired by Boccaccio.