Monica Martinelli is a PhD student in Applied Linguistics and a Graduate Fellow in the Team-TERRA Training Program at the University of Connecticut. She is a Graduate Teaching Assistant for the Neag School of Education and previously taught all levels of Italian, as well as Italian culture and cinema and Cognitive Sciences. She holds an MA degree from the multi-university Erasmus Mundus Master’s program “Crossways in Cultural Narratives” at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the expansion of the Italian literary canon to encompass female and racialized authors.