Meet the Finalists of the 2025 ISSNAF Young Investigator RnB4Culture Award
- chiaragallo7
- Oct 17
- 6 min read
Established in 2021 by RnB4Culture, this award recognizes the vibrancy of research in Italian culture and its evolving nature expressed in a variety of ways such as innovative uses of technology, or originality of approach, or contribution to wider questions and trends in the Humanities at large.
We’re thrilled to announce and celebrate the outstanding finalists for this year’s edition:
Cristina Carnemolla
Sara Galli
Luca Zipoli
Discover more about their impressive research, which they will present before a distinguished jury chaired by Prof. Franco Pierno (Toronto University) and composed by Prof. Gianni Cicali (Georgetown University), Prof. Stefania Lucamante (Università di Cagliari - Catholic University of Washington), and Prof. Stefano Jossa (Royal Holloway University of London, Università degli Studi di Palermo).
The winner will be announced at the ISSNAF 2025 Annual Event in Washington, D.C., on November 6.
CRISTINA CARNEMOLLA
Cristina Carnemolla is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic and Italian Studies at McGill University, specializing in nineteenth-century literature and cultural history. She received her Ph.D. in Romance Studies from Duke University (2023).
Her research examines the reception of realism and naturalism in Italy, Spain, Peru, and Argentina. She is currently completing her first monograph, Harvesting Truth: Southern Realism as an Extractivist Aesthetic, which integrates approaches from the environmental humanities, literary analysis, and political ecology to expand the concept of extractivism into the realm of transnational literary criticism.
A second strand of her scholarship explores Marxist thinkers of the 1930s, including Antonio Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui. She is a cofounder of the Gramsci Research Collective–Collectif de Recherche Gramscienne (GRC–CRG) and a coeditor of the forthcoming volume Gramsci in Motion: The Trajectories of Praxis (Brill).
Her publications address topics such as the reception of realism and naturalism in Italy and Spain, women writers of the long nineteenth century, Antonio Gramsci, and ecocriticism.
In addition to her research, she is deeply committed to teaching. Her dedication has been fostered by the Sustainability Education Fellowship (McGill, 2023–2024) and recognized through the AATI Teaching Black Italy grant and the CEDILS diploma.
Research Focus
"Harvesting Truth: Southern Realism as an Extractivist Aesthetic" examines the reception of realism and naturalism in Argentina, Italy, Peru, and Spain during the decline of the Spanish Empire. By focusing on regions often considered “peripheral”—such as Sicily, Galicia, the Pampas, and the Andes—the project challenges conventional North–South divides and shows how both Mediterranean and Latin American spaces were historically treated as colonial or semi-colonial territories, exploited for raw materials and labor.
Adopting a transnational approach that bridges Mediterranean and Transatlantic studies, the project reinterprets texts traditionally confined within national frameworks. It proposes an extractivist reading that highlights how late nineteenth-century governments used agrarian, mining, and fishing sectors as “sacrifice zones” for national modernization. Literature both depicted and participated in this process: realist and naturalist aesthetics turned marginalized people—fishermen, laborers, gauchos, and Indigenous communities—into raw material for national literary markets.
While Italian verismo sought to distinguish itself from French naturalism, and Spanish and Latin American authors developed looser adaptations, all these movements shared an extractivist orientation. Through its interdisciplinary lens, the project demonstrates how realist and naturalist aesthetics reflected and reinforced extractivist ideologies, offering a decolonial method for understanding their cultural and political impact across Southern Europe and Latin America.
About Her
Born and raised in Sicily, her research is rooted in a deep passion for Verga’s verist novels and in her desire to situate them within a transnational framework of analysis. Her comparative and multilingual approach began with a B.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of Catania and was enriched through academic experiences at the Pädagogische Hochschule in Germany, the University of Oregon, and Duke University in the United States. In addition to Italian (and Sicilian), she is fluent in Spanish and English, and is currently improving her French.
SARA GALLI
Sara Galli holds a master's degree in Modern Philology and a master's degree in Teaching Italian to Foreigners from the Università degli studi di Genova. She finished her doctoral studies in Italian Studies at the University of Toronto in 2024 with a thesis on Dante Alighieri's didactic project. In 2019, together with her colleague Mohammad Javad Jamali, she started a research focused on the matter of gender disparity and hidden biases in Italian and other Romance languages. Since then, she has published in various peer-reviewed journals, has held workshops at different academic settings, and presented her research on this topic. In 2023, she started teaching at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she also promotes the use of inclusive language across all departments.
https://dickinson.academia.edu/SaraGalliPhD https://www.dickinson.edu/site/custom_scripts/dc_faculty_profile_index.php?fac=gallis
Research Focus
Sara Galli's research investigates how the Italian language encodes gender inequality (for example, how feminine professional job titles are used or avoided). She studies perceptions among L1 and L2 speakers of Italian about the "fairness" of language and suggests ways to make teaching Italian more inclusive. As a former high school teacher, she understands the importance of designing reliable teaching materials to K-12 instructors. Thus, her project is focused on building a database with the purpose of sharing it with the teaching community. Indeed, research findings revealed a disconnect between Italian instructors' inclusive intentions and their linguistic resources.
Her project also include the creation of the Instagram profile Teachers for Inclusive Pedagogy (T.I.P.), aiming to help to expand the conversation, offering space for real-time feedback, intergenerational dialogue, and public discussion of inclusive language in Italian classrooms.
For all of the abovementioned reasons, Sara Galli's project is important and innovative since it strives to create a connection between the academic study and classroom practice; it speaks directly to current debates in the humanities around gender justice and institutional change; it builds a space for participatory research and cultural engagement, breaking down the boundary between scholarly and public discourse.
About Her
Sara Galli's professional career includes teaching Italian language and culture to all age groups in various settings, from K-12 to university. She has taught in Europe, Canada, and the United States. Her strong commitment to Italian studies made her an active member of the field, and, while a graduate student, she acted as an executive member of the American Association of Teachers of Italian (AATI), and she helped the Association gain a prominent social media presence. She was also the president of her department's graduate students' body.
LUCA ZIPOLI
Luca Zipoli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Transnational Italian Studies at Bryn Mawr College, where he is also affiliated to the Program in Comparative Literature. He holds a Ph.D. in Italian literature from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he also completed his undergraduate studies. He has researched and taught as a Visiting Scholar at Princeton and New York University, and was appointed as Fellow of the Italian Academy at Columbia University for the Spring of 2025. His field of scholarly interests spans a broad variety of topics in Renaissance Italian Literature, with a special reference to early-modern Florence. His publications in the field include the co-edited two volumes “Lettura del «Morgante»” (Florence, Olschki, 2025) as well as several essays on Luigi Pulci, Antonia Tanini Pulci, and Torquato Tasso. Luca Zipoli’s future single-authored monograph is titled “Around The Magnificent: Poetry, Magic and Religion in Early Modern Florence”. This book is part of the major research project titled “Globalizing the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges in Early-Modern Florence (1439-1492)”, that has thus far received funds from the Scuola Normale Superiore, Bryn Mawr College, and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University.
Research Focus
Luca Zipoli’s research investigates Renaissance Florence by adopting a cross-cultural and transnational approach. The relationships between historical events, religious beliefs, and cultural exchanges under the Medicis are the main concern of his book project titled “Around The Magnificent: Poetry, Magic and Religion in Early Modern Florence”, which he aims to develop from his Ph.D. dissertation thanks to the support of ISSNAF and RnB4Culture. This book fills a gap in the history of Renaissance culture, by placing Florentine literature in the global context of the Mediterranean, and by showing how the innovative humanistic ideals were profoundly influenced by migrant intellectuals and cultural interactions on a transnational scale. The role of women within this process of cultural transformation is also very much of interest to his research, with a special reference to Antonia Tanini Pulci – the first woman writer to appear in print in Italy – who negotiated her own voice within this new cultural environment. Luca Zipoli believes that the impact of this research goes beyond the field of Renaissance Studies, since it illuminates new cultural exchanges and cross-cultural interactions in our past that can help us better understand features and challenges of our contemporary globalized societies.
About him
In his research Luca Zipoli focuses on the migrations and transfers of thinkers, ideas, and languages in the Italian Renaissance by adopting a trans-national and cross-cultural approach. For this reason, he is particularly elated and honored to be a proud member of ISSNAF, which has at the core of its mission the promotion of similar cultural exchanges between Italy and North-America, and which empowers interdisciplinary encounters on a global scale. Luca Zipoli is looking forward to fostering these intellectual values within the foundation by sharing his research outcomes and by helping with the design of collaborative outreach initiatives.
Comments