I am interested in language and gender in Italy/Italian. My research examines sexist language used to reconstruct the traditional arrangement in Italian society (men/public - women/private) and failed and successful attempts to subvert this. Using quantitative (corpus linguistics) and qualitative methods, I explore generic terms (grammatically masculine) to refer to female politicians as well as sexual terms to insult them. I also worked on media and parliamentary language when describing the gendered crime of femminicidio. Recently, I have investigated conventional messages used by fathers to police (their) daughters' sexuality.

At the moment, I am working on the public response to the Gillette advert (with Dr Mandie Iveson), inclusive language in Italian (with Dr Anna Lisa Somma) and on representation of violence against women in newspapers (with Dr Laura Torre) and in the TV news.

I obtained my PhD at Lancaster University in June 2014. The title of my PhD is "Gender and language use in the Italian parliament"

During and after the PhD, I taught in several universities (listed below= as a fixed-term lecturer or an associate tutor. Before I joined Brighton University (in 2018), I experienced what many early career researchers and wanna-be lecturers are facing, that is a very difficult job market. 

I am interested in supervising students in the following disciplines (or combination of these):

- language, gender and sexuality

- corpus linguistics

- multimodality

- discourses around racism, sexism, transphobia and homophobia

- language describing violence against women in UK and other parts of the world.

Please do contact me if you are interested in spending a visiting period for your PhD research. 

A Master student I surpervised in the a.y. 2019/2020 has recently won the Best Student Essay at the IGALA11 CONFERENCE (International gender and language association), Queen's Mary 2021.