Photo of Mazza, Giordano

Giordano Mazza, PhD

Visiting Lecturer of Italian

Hispanic and Italian Studies

Contact

Building & Room:

UH 1828

Hours

Office Hours - Fall 2025
Sunday
Monday 02:00pm – 03:00pm
Tuesday
Wednesday 02:00pm – 03:00pm
Thursday
Friday 02:00pm – 03:00pm
Saturday

About

Dr. Giordano Mazza is a Visiting Lecturer of Italian in the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. He holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a Master's and a Bachelor's degree in English and Spanish Literature, each earned in Italy.

His current research interests include world pandemic studies, environmental literature and cinema, and 20th-century Italian literature, with a focus on Italo Calvino. In Fall 2023, he held a series of guest lectures at different schools and universities on Calvino as a visionary environmentalist.

Dr. Mazza was born and raised in Italy but spent several years studying abroad. He has taught Italian and Spanish in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Tennessee, for a total of over 9 years.

Selected Grants

Center for Teaching, Sewanee, The University of the South, Teaching Enrichment Grant, 2021/2022

Selected Publications

Regrowth and Rebirth in Alice Rohrwacher’s Cinema“. In Italian Quarterly, LXI, 241/242, 2024 (Spring 2025)

Italo Calvino, un visionario ambientalista. Author profile for the AATI Newsletter Fall 2023

The Secrets of Calvino’s Ars Combinatoria. In Italica, v. 99, no. I, Spring 2022

Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno. Dopo la peste. Desiderio e Ragione nella Decima Giornata del Decameron. Firenze: Olschki, 2021. Pp. 126. In Annali d’Italianistica, v. 41, 2023

Paolo Traniello. Le opere e i libri. Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni alle soglie dell’editoria moderna. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2021. Pp. 191. In Annali d’Italianistica, v. 41, 2023

Antonio Mileo. L’eroe fuori gioco. La struttura dello spazio nella Gerusalemme Liberata. Napoli: Paolo Loffredo Editore, 2020. Pp. 277. ISBN: 9788832193442. In Quaderni d’Italianistica, v. 43, no. 1, 2022

Giuliana Adamo. Désordre. Futurismi di ieri e di oggi. Roma: Armando Editore, 2021. Pp. 159. In Annali d’Italianistica, v. 40 (https://annali.org/volume-40-2022/).

Elio Attilio Baldi. The Author in Criticism: Italo Calvino’s Authorial Image in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. Pp. 306. In Annali d’Italianistica, v. 38, 2020 (Spring 2020) (https://annali.org/volumes/volume-38-2020/).

Notable Honors

2020/2021, Leadership Award Recipient, Graduate Association of French and Italian Students, University of Wisconsin-Madison

2019-2020, Instructor of Honor Award Recipient, University Housing, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Education

PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison

Selected Presentations

  • NeMLA 2025 – Philadelphia, PA – Black Death vs Red Death: Historical vs fictitious plagues (March 2025)
  • NeMLA 2024 – Boston, MA - Integrating Sustainability into the L2 classroom (March 2024)
  • NeMLA 2023 – Buffalo, NY - The Resilience of Nature amid Environmental Destruction in Alice Rohrwacher’s Cinema (March 2023)
  • NeMLA 2022 – Baltimore, MD - The False Authenticity of Books in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (March 2022)
  • SIS PG Colloquium Really Fantastic 2022 – Virtual Symposium - Moderator of panel The Fantastic and Italo Calvino (February 2022)
  • NeMLA 2021 – Virtual Conference - Calvino’s Machines: a Key to Anti-anthropocentrism (March 2021)

Selected Guest Lectures

  • Italo Calvino: a Visionary Environmentalist. University of Illinois at Chicago, October 25, 2023
  • Italo Calvino: un Ambientalista Visionario. Ridgewood High School, November 2, 2023