The Italian Colony of São Paulo:
Race, Class, and Cultural
Capital in Brazil
Critical Studies in Italian Migrations, Fordham University Press, 2025
This book argues that Italians first became racialized as white in São Paulo, Brazil, at the turn of the twentieth century. Whereas Italians in the United States struggled with xenophobia and were often not fully acknowledged as white, in São Paulo, due to a series of social, economic, and cultural factors, Italians became closely associated with ideas of whiteness, modernization, and civilization.
Winner, 27th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies, Modern Languages Association
As a scholar of modern Italian and Brazilian literature who studies class, migration, and race, I am particularly interested in identifying how the concept of Italian identity has evolved beyond the strict geographical confines of the Italian nation-state. In my research, I chart the emergence of a specific set of discourses about Italian culture in Brazil and the US to dispel the myth that the meaning and scope of Italianness are self-evident. By decentering Italy as the principal locus of Italian culture, my scholarship not only reveals the plurality of “authentic” Italian cultural identities; it also radically reimagines who counts as Italian, thereby undermining the nationalist, classist, and racist underpinnings of modern Italy’s self-conception.
I am originally from Vignola, a picturesque borgo nestled in the hills of Modena and Bologna, famous for its cherries (morette and duroni) and for the torta Barozzi cake, named after the architect Jacopo Barozzi who gave the town its renowned spiral staircase. I am a former American Field Service (AFS) student, and I have been affiliated with the Universidade Clássica de Lisboa, the University of California Davis, the Universidade de São Paulo, and the Global South Studies Center of the Universität zu Köln.
What does it mean to be Italian in a culture defined by border crossing and internal diversity?
Teaching
In all my courses, my central objective is to introduce students to a multilingual, multiracial, and transnational Italian identity.
