Phd Graduate Students

Angela Mininni This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. was born and raised in Bari, Italy, where she graduated summa cum laude with a Master’s thesis in Ancient Philology, Literature and History about Aristophanes’ Plutus. Soon after graduation, she moved to the States to work as an au pair, during which she acquired life-changing skills, such as intercultural communication and fluent proficiency in English. After her experience as an au pair, she completed a Master of Arts in Teaching at Rutgers University, where she compiled and presented her teaching portfolio while being an active resource to the Italian Department.  After one year on the field, teaching the culture and language of her country, she decided to use her own experience as an immigrant writer to continue her education and pursue the PhD with the Italian Department, a second home to her. Three words to describe her: enthusiastic, bright, and sweet.

Sixth-Year PhD Candidate

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Maria Teresa De Luca (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) Maria Teresa’s research focuses on theories of genre and of narrative, and on their intersection with theory of language in the twentieth and twenty-first century, including uses of and reflections on genre in the works of Malaparte and Fenoglio. She also has standing interests and ongoing work in Medieval Italian literature and language.
She is working on manuscript Ashb. 956, one of the very few southern Italian vernacular translations of the Liber abaci by Leonardo Pisano, and is associate editor and encoder for Petrarchive. She worked on the main Italian etymological and historical dictionaries (LEI - Lessico Etimologico Italiano, DI - Deonomasticon Italicum and TLIO - Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini).
She previously studied at the Universität des Saarlandes (Germany) where she obtained a Ph.D. in Italian linguistics. Her dissertation, titled ‘La terminologia linguistica in Lingua nostra (1939-1978)’, focused on the history of Italian language, specifically on the creation and development of the terminology used by Italian linguistics during the XX Century. Her dissertation was awarded the ‘Premio Giovanni Nencioni’ by the Accademia della Crusca.