Researchers

Claudia Demattè assumed the role of full professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Trento in May 2024. From December 2021 to May 2024 she occupied the role of full professor of Spanish Language and Translation (L-LIN/07) in the Department of Humanities at the University of Trento.

Her research interests include the study of 16th-century Spanish chivalric romances, the reception and translation of Miguel de Cervantes’ works in Italy, and the Golden Age Spanish theater, with a particular focus on the dramatist Juan Pérez de Montalbán. She serves as the Principal Investigator of the international project Un autor madrileño recuperado: Juan Pérez de Montalbán, undertaken in collaboration with institutions such as the City Council of Madrid, the Municipal Historical Library of Madrid, and the Complutense University of Madrid. Since 2005, she has overseen the publication of nine volumes in the “Obras de Juan Pérez de Montalbán” series at Reichenberger Edition, Kassel.

Professor Demattè is actively engaged in several international research collaborations, including HÍLICA – Hibridismo literario y cultura áurea at the Complutense University of Madrid and the Iberian Books of Chivalry in English Translation Series (IBCETS) at the Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Her national research endeavors involve significant contributions to multiple PRIN projects focused on Early Modern Spanish Theater and Spanish Romances of Chivalry.She was awarded the IX Marcelo Reyes Translation Prize by the Olifante Publishing House in Zaragoza for her translation of José Manuel Lucía Megías’s poetry collection, Trento, o el triunfo de la espera (March 2024).

Elisa Ravazzolo received a PhD in French Linguistics from the University of Brescia, Italy, in 2007. After several experiences in scientific research and academic teaching, she joined the Department of Humanities of the University of Trento, where she became Associate Professor in 2020. In 2023, she obtained the Italian National Scientific Habilitation (ASN) for Full Professor in French Language, Translation and Linguistics.

Elisa Ravazzolo’s research primarily explores verbal interaction in French, emphasizing linguistic, enunciative, and pragmatic aspects through empirical-inductive analysis of natural oral interactions. Her work includes examining media-political interactions from an intercultural perspective, comparing French and Italian discourse. She also investigates how artistic-cultural mediation practices relate to social issues like the process of linguistic and cultural integration of migrants or the valorization and exposure of individual testimony for the (re)-construction of historical memory. Additionally, her interests include studying the linguistic and pragmatic features of theatrical texts, particularly focusing on translating oral phenomena. Part of her research also involves applying corpora of natural oral data to teach spoken French, enhancing practical understanding and application in educational settings.She has participated in several research projects, including the research international project “MarDisCo” (since 2023) funded by the Labex ASLAN (Advanced Studies on LANguage complexity, ENS – Université de Lyon) which intends to study the conversational uses of discourse markers and interjections of French and Italian talk-in-interaction. Since 2015 she has also participated in the application of pedagogical resources based on the results of research into the analysis of interactions (Corpus de langues parlées en interaction – Français Langue Étrangère). Her current research focuses on discursive and pragmatic characteristics of oral testimonies and on the practices of their cultural mediation in historical museums.

Since 2020, Fabiana Rosi is full professor of Educational Linguistics at the Department of Humanities, University of Trento. She is currently the Rector’s Delegate for Language Policy of the University of Trento. From 2021 to 2024 she was Rector’s Delegate for Language Education and President of the Language Centre of the University of Trento. She is founder and director of the Inter-University Research Centre “LinE – Language in Education”, composed of 12 European universities and 270 scholars from more than 40 scientific-disciplinary fields, which promotes scientific collaborations on the role of language in the teaching of different disciplines.

She graduated in Classic Literatures at the University of Pisa in 2004 and received a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Pavia in 2008. After research and teaching experiences in different Universities (Modena and Reggio Emilia, Bolzano, Genova, Siena), she has been associate professor of Educational Linguistics at the University of Salerno, where she coordinated teacher training courses in the area of Italian as part of the national network “I Lincei per la scuola” promoted by the Foundation “I Lincei per la scuola” and the National Academy of Lincei.

She has been participating in national and international scientific projects on Second Language Acquisition and Language Education. She is part of the editorial board of national and international journals, of scientific committees of national and international congresses and of the Doctoral School “Forms of Cultural Exchange and Textuality” of the University of Trento.

Fabiana’s research interests include Educational Linguistics, Language Education, Language Acquisition and Language Variation. She is currently studying the role of the mother tongue and the foreign languages in teaching different disciplines at school and at the university. She is also investigating the employment of advertising in Language Education from a grammatical, lexical, and intercultural perspective.

Katharina Salzmann received a PhD in German Linguistics from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2015. From 2016 to 2018 she was a research assistant at the Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici, Rome in an international project on multilingualism. From 2018 to 2022 she worked as a Junior Assistant Professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Faculty of Education, where she gained valuable experience in the field of language acquisition, teacher training and didactics with young children. In 2020 she obtained the National Scientific Habilitation (ASN) for Associate Professor in German Linguistics in Italy. In April 2024 she joined the Department of Philology and Philosophy of the University of Trento as a Senior Assistant Professor.

She participated in several research projects, including GeWiss (an international project on spoken academic communication) during PhD (2012-2015), and a project on German as a third language and multilingualism in the European Union funded by the Italian Ministry of Education (2016-2018). She was co-PI of a project on first and multilingual language acquisition in kindergarten children growing up in the Ladin valleys in South Tyrol (2019-2021) and currently collaborates in the PRIN project “German Language in Italy: where we are and where we want to go”, in a trilateral (Germany-Italy-France) project on digitally mediated academic communication as well as in the Erasmus+ project “Diversity in action: a cross-border online space for training teachers through multilingual and multicultural experiences”.

Salzmann’s current research focuses on the acquisition of grammatical and pragmatic knowledge in German as a first or second language in children at kindergarten age and on the acquisition of German as a third language after Italian and English. Another focus of Salzmann’s work is the study of spoken German, including the academic variety of different genres, such as conference talks and digital or hybrid lectures.

Luca Morlino is Assistant Professor of Romance Philology and Linguistics at the University of Trento, where he also taught as Instructor. He previously taught Italian Language and Culture at the Universities of Torun (UMK), Gdansk (ASW) and Warsaw (SWPS), and Rheto-Romance Language and Culture at the University of Bozen. Before that, he was a Post-doc Research Fellow at the Italian Council Research (CNR) Institute “Opera del Vocabolario Italiano” in Florence and at the University of Padua, where he graduated and received his PhD in Romance Philology and Linguistics.

He has published critical editions with linguistic commentary of Medieval Romance literary texts. He is also the author of many articles on Medieval Romance Languages and Literatures, with particular reference to the topics indicated below.

He obtained the National Scientific Qualification (ASN) as both Associate Professor and Full Professor in Romance Philology and Linguistics.

Serenella Baggio has been professor of Italian Linguistics at the University of Trento  since 2002. She achieved her qualification for full professorship in 2014, requalified in 2019, and was appointed to the highest professorial tier in 2021. Her academic journey began under the guidance of Gianfranco Folena at the University of Padova, where she earned her degree in 1978, her specialization in 1987, and her Ph.D. in the same year. Her early career included a significant period as a lecturer of Italian at the University of Würzburg from 1979 to 1983, and she held a teaching position at high school from 1987 to 2001.

In 2001, she qualified as an associate professor in Italian Linguistics and joined the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in Trento. Serenella Baggio is a member of the Doctoral School and has been involved in dual master’s and doctoral degrees with the Technische Universität Dresden and the University of Augsburg. She has organized diverse interdisciplinary conferences blending linguistics with anthropology and has contributed to the ERC-2020-AdG Graff-IT project on graffiti in medieval churches. Her ongoing involvement includes the PRIN project on Ps. Albertus Magnus’s De mirabilibus mundi, led by Alessandro Palazzo.

Her publications span various domains within Italian linguistics and philology, including studies on non-literary medieval texts focusing on encyclopedias and medical translations, as showcased in her examination of common Italian in 17th-century Venice (Testimonianze di italiano comune nella Venezia del ‘600, 2023). She has collaborated on early vernacular documents with E. Curzel in Studi Trentini. Storia, and her critical analysis of Boccaccio and debates on anti-Boccaccism are detailed in numerous writings. Her work extends to cultural transfer studies about the migration of Italian culture to Dresden and broader linguistic issues. She also engages deeply with popular writings, encompassing a wide array of texts from correspondences, diaries to memoirs and graffiti, which she studies as part of a broader examination of vernacular expressions and social histories. This exploration covers diverse topics such as transoceanic emigration, writings by miners during the Great War, and letters to television celebrities, undertaken in collaboration with the Archive of Popular Writing in Trento.Serenella Baggio’s research also covers bourgeois writings of the 20th century, focusing on liberal anti-fascism and the architectural milieu, and includes studies on political figures such as Gianni Rodari. Moreover, she explores the use of gestures in spoken language, as seen in her co-edited volume Gesticolar parlando (2022). She has also made significant contributions to the understanding of non-verbal communication in historical contexts through her editorial work on the edition of the Phonogrammarchiv zu Wien (2019).

Sofia Graziani is Associate professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Humanities and the School of International Studies at the University of Trento, where she teaches courses of Chinese language and culture and History of modern and contemporary China.

Her research focuses on the history of modern and contemporary China, with a specific interest in the CCP’s management of and discourse surrounding youth and the role played by Chinese youth organisations both at the domestic level and from a historical transnational perspective. She has also worked on China-Italy relations during the Cold War years as well as on Beijing’s people diplomacy and global soft power strategy, including the analysis of China’s discourse and official narrative about China-Africa relations in the XXI century.

She is currently local PI of a research project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research (PRIN – Research Projects of National Relevance) entitled “Biographical Database of Italians in China, 1866-1970” jointly conducted by Sapienza the University of Rome (national coordination unit), the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Milan), and the University of Trento.

Her works have appeared in various international academic journals dedicated to East Asia/China, such as Modern Asian Studies, Twentieth- Century China, European Journal of East Asian Studies and The Journal of the European Association of Chinese Studies.

She has recently co-edited (together with Laura De Giorgi and Yang Weijian) a special issue of the European Journal of East Asian Studies (Brill), Issue 1, 23 (2024) titled “Chinese Youth and Socialism, from the Soviet Republic to the Early Post-Mao Years: Historical and Cultural Perspectives”  https://brill.com/view/journals/ejea/23/1/ejea.23.issue-1.xml

Prior to joining the University of Trento, she was a recipient of the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation’s postdoctoral fellowship (Taiwan, 2012-2013), held a three-year research position (RTDa) at the University of Bologna (2013-2016) and taught courses of History and Institutions of Modern China/East Asia at various Italian universities as well as at Peking University. From 2019 to 2023 she has been a member of the Board of the Italian Association of Chinese Studies.