My teaching, like my research, is highly interdisciplinary. It is shaped by my doctoral training in literature and culture and by my postdoctoral study history and art history. Whether lectures or seminars, my courses focus on texts, images, and ideas, and on situating them in social, cultural, political, and historical context. At Stanford, these courses often involve trips to the library to study rare book materials or to the Cantor Arts Center. Though frequently centered on Italy and on the early modern period, my courses tend to pursue questions that transcend disciplinary interests and borders, and because of this, to span multiple centuries and fields. 

I have designed and delivered thirteen discrete courses, and taught four more, at different institutions. I developed eight of these courses at Stanford: three graduate and five undergraduate. My courses combine field-specific content and methodologies with open ended questions and a comparative, interdisciplinary approach. My undergraduate course, “Great Minds of the Italian Renaissance and their World,” for example, explores the topics of genius, creativity, and polymathy.

In my courses, I combine canonical figures and works with lesser-known individuals and cultural expressions that share a natural affinity or complementarity based on form, content, or question pursued. For example, “Gods and Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity,” a course on human nature, education, and the good life that I have taught in the Education as Self-Fashioning program, features philosophical and literary texts and visual art spanning antiquity to the present and multiple cultural traditions (American, Chinese, English, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, and Netherlandish, and South African). 

Advising is at the core of my teaching activities and identity. At Stanford, I have served as an advisor, co-advisor, and reader on PhD dissertation committees and as a member of doctoral exam committees (qualifying, field/comprehensive, and prospectus/oral) for graduate students in multiple programs (French and Italian, Comparative Literature, and History). My mentoring and advising extends to undergraduate students too. At Stanford, I served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for Italian and participated on the Undergraduate Affairs Committee for three years (2020-2023) . In 2025-2026, I will serve as Chair of Undergraduate Studies for the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

Collaboration has been tremendously important in my teaching and in my development as an instructor. At Stanford, I have given guest lectures, talks for the residential Structured Liberal Education Program, and lessons in collectively taught courses in the School of Continuing Studies (on Raphael and on Dante, respectively). My Education as Self-Fashioning (ESF) course is delivered collaboratively in partnership with a colleague in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric.

Teaching Philosophy

Three fundamental beliefs shape my teaching and my instructional approach: 1) Learning is a process that takes the whole person into account. 2) Teaching is as much a disposition of heart and mind as it is a series of coordinated actions. 3. Effective teaching is principled teaching.

Learning is a deeply personal experiential process. The quality of the journey and of its outcomes are greatly informed by the context in which it takes place: the classroom environment and its dynamics. I strive to create a safe, supportive, stimulating and collaborative environment where mutual respect, collaboration, and dignity are exemplified in a collective pursuit of excellence. 

A safe learning environment is one where students are free to seek clarification, to request assistance, to creatively explore and experiment with new ideas, and to express their thoughts and opinions. This presupposes a non-judgmental and friendly learning facilitator who not only explains, models, and ensures classroom civility, but also understands that it is through trial and error that competence is acquired, and through difference and debate that ideas are defined and refined, changed, and developed. 

A supportive academic environment is an inclusive environment where all types of learners and learning styles are honored, but also challenged. To facilitate this, I use example and repetition (preferred by sensing learners), while highlighting or leading students to notice connections and patterns (preferred by intuitive learners). I first present theoretical material as a big picture (preferred by global learners), but I explain its complexity or application in a methodical, step-by-step manner (preferred by sequential learners). The presentation of content though questions is appreciated by reflective learners, who are guided by thought-provoking queries to arrive at their own understanding of a concept or principle, while the tasks students are asked to perform in class give active learners the needed opportunity to learn by doing.  

A stimulating and collaborative environment is necessarily an interactive one. To this end, I consistently endeavor to create a dynamic, active, high-energy classroom: by communicating passionate enthusiasm; by varying methods of input; by changing activities and tasks; by physically moving around the room and engaging students in dialogue, debate, and collaborative assignments. I cater to the affective and social requirements of my students to enhance the learning process by fostering relationships among them. 

Instructional Approach

The close examination of primary sources is at the core of my instructional approach. I have long emphasized linguistic and literary analysis in my teaching and engaging students in making sense of texts and how they function. Textual examination, with attention to language, structure, and style, is a cornerstone of my approach to teaching. In my classes, students examine texts closely and become skilled at analyzing and synthesizing a variety of primary and secondary sources. Historically and recently, I have analyzed film, music, opera, and works of art and architecture with my students. Increasingly, I focus on visual and textual primary sources and their interpretation or comparative analysis to assist my students in developing the capacity to be fully present with texts, images, ideas, and each other, to be deeply attentive to them, and to know the joy this can bring. My aim is not only to instruct but to engage and to inspire; to encourage students to interact with the materials and with each other in a spirit of curiosity and an openness to synergistic exchange, and to facilitate this for them. 

While my specific instructional aims inevitably center on the transmission and facilitation of field-specific declarative and procedural knowledge and the development of critical thinking and communication skills, my ultimate goal is to produce students who are aware of both what they see and how they see – individuals prepared to challenge their own assumptions and to be effective and compassionate citizens of a broad and diverse global community. 

The graduate and undergraduate courses I have designed and delivered reflect my research interests and intellectual investments as well as my commitment to the humanities and my deep and abiding love for education and the liberal arts.

In June 2023, I was honored to receive a Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Award from the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University.

COURSES (a representative selection)

“Between Gods and Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity” (freshman seminar)

Centuries ago, Plotinus famously wrote that humanity was “poised midway between gods and
beasts” (Enneads 3.2.8). Some individuals “grow like to the divine,” he asserted, and “others to the brute.” Since antiquity, many different societies, east and west, have understood education as a fundamental factor in determining whether individuals became fully realized as human beings or something less. Considered a civilizing force for individuals and societies, education aimed not only at the acquisition of knowledge and skills, but also at the cultivation of goodness, the attainment of wisdom, and the achievement of happiness. In short, the goal of learning was to live well. What does it mean to live well? How does one cultivate one’s nature or become one’s best possible self? What kind of personal and intellectual development does this presuppose? Are there limits to the human capacity for self-development and change? In this course we will ponder such questions as we reflect critically on human nature and on historical and contemporary ideas regarding education, self-development, and living well.

“Michelangelo: Gateway to Early Modern Italy” (Art History, History, Italian; grad/undergrad)

Revered as one of the greatest artists in history, Michelangelo Buonarroti’s extraordinarily long and prodigious existence (1475–1564) spanned the Renaissance and the Reformation in Italy. The celebrity artist left behind not only sculptures, paintings, drawings, and architectural designs, but also an abundantly rich and heterogeneous collection of artifacts, including direct and indirect correspondence (approximately 1400 letters), an eclectic assortment of personal notes, documents and contracts, and 302 poems and 41 poetic fragments. This course will explore the life and production of Michelangelo in relation to those of his contemporaries. Using the biography of the artist as a thread, this interdisciplinary course will draw on a range of critical methodologies and approaches to investigate the civilization and culture of Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Course themes will follow key tensions that defined the period and that found expression in Michelangelo: physical-spiritual, classical- Christian, tradition-innovation, individual-collective.

“Great Minds of the Italian Renaissance and Their World” (Art History, History, Italian; undergrad)

What enabled Leonardo da Vinci to excel in over a dozen fields from painting to engineering and to anticipate flight four hundred years before the first aircraft took off? How did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel Ceiling? What forces and insights led Machiavelli to write The Prince? An historical moment and a cultural era, the Italian Renaissance famously saw monumental achievements in literature, art, and architecture, influential developments in science and technology, and the flourishing of multi-talented individuals who contributed profoundly, expertly and simultaneously to very different fields. In this course on the great thinkers, writers, and achievers of the Italian Renaissance, we will study these “universal geniuses” and their world. Investigating the writings, thought, and lives of such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Galileo Galilei, we will interrogate historical and contemporary ideas concerning genius, creativity, and the phenomenon of “Renaissance man” known as polymathy.

“Word and Image” (Art History, Complit, Italian; grad/undergrad)

What impact do images have on our reading of a text? How do words influence our understanding of images or our reading of pictures? What makes a visual interpretation of written words or a verbal rendering of an image successful? These questions will guide our investigation of the manifold connections between words and images in this course on intermediality and the relations and interrelations between writing and art from classical antiquity to the present. Readings and discussions will include such topics as the life and afterlife in word and image of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost; the writings and creative production of poet-artists Michelangelo Buonarroti, William Blake, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; innovations in and correspondences between literature and art in the modern period, from symbolism in the nineteenth century through the flourishing of European avant-garde movements in the twentieth century. 

“The Pen and The Sword: A Gendered History” (CompLit, FemGen, History, Italian; undergrad)

As weapons, the pen and the sword have been used to wound, punish, and condemn as well as to protect, liberate, and elevate. Historically entangled with ideals of heroism, nobility, and civility, the pen and the sword have been the privileged instruments of men. Yet, throughout history, women have picked up the pen and the sword in defense, despair, and outrage as well as with passion, vision, and inspiration. This course is dedicated to them, and to study of works on love, sex, and power that articulate female experience. In our readings and seminars, we will encounter real and fictive women in their own words and in narrations and depictions by others from classical antiquity to the present, with a special focus on the Renaissance and on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Touching on such topics as flattery and slander through the study of misogynistic, protofeminist, and feminist works in the early modern and modern periods in various European literary traditions, we will consider questions of truth and falsehood in fiction and in life. Course materials span a variety genres and media, from poetry, letters, dialogues, public lectures, treatises, short stories, and drama to painting, sculpture, music, and film – works regarded for their aesthetic, intellectual, religious, social, and political value and impact.