Faculty and Administration
- Jump to information about:
- Monica Capacci
- Gregory Conti
- Gloria Convertito
- Marcello D'Andrea
- Donna Logan
- Renato Perucchio
- Federico Siniscalco
- Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio
- John H. Thomas
Monica Capacci
University of Siena/Arezzo
Art History
Monica Capacci holds a degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Florence, Italy. She is currently working on her Masters in Art History from the University of Siena. She teaches Italian language and culture. Her major areas of interest are Renaissance Art and modern Italian culture. Since 1998 she has been working for the Program in Italian Studies in Arezzo as an Italian instructor and assistant director.
Gregory Conti
University of Perugia
History
Gregory Conti graduated from Yale Law School in 1980 after obtaining a B.A. and an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Notre Dame and Yale, respectively. He has lived in Perugia since 1985 where he teaches English at the University of Perugia and translates contemporary Italian literature. His published translations include works by Rosetta Loy, Mario Rigoni Stern, and Vitaliano Brancati. He is also a frequent contributor to the on-line translation journal, Words Without Borders and the Rutgers literary journal Raritan, where he is also an advisory editor.
He is currently working on translations of Christian Marazzi’s Capital and Language for M.I.T. Press and Corpo, a zany collection of ruminations by the Venetian writer, Tiziano Scarpa.
Gloria Convertito
Accademia Britannica
Italian Language
Bio coming soon!
Marcello D'Andrea
University of Florence
Administration
Marcello D'Andrea received his Doctorate in biology and animal ethology from the University of Florence in 1983. Ever since, he has collaborated intensively with the zoology section of the Museum of Natural History at the University of Florence. His publications include specialized books and articles on the evolution of the social behavior of spiders and on functional morphology, biogeography, and systematics of African dragonflies. He has participated in several conferences, won scientific prizes, and described several new species of insects. He was at Columbia University as a Visiting Scholar in 1991. He has worked within the Arezzo Program since its foundation in 1994 in various capacities, as a director on location, administrator, and Italian language instructor. He currently directs a center of studies devoted to prehistory and paleo-environmental research in two archeological sites of the Tiber Valley in Tuscany. The center is connected to the University of Siena by an agreement of scientific collaboration. D'Andrea is also specialized in pedagogy for the visually impaired and has created tactile itineraries in several Tuscan museums of natural history. He has taught mathematics and biology in middle schools. He is an expert in medieval local history and heraldry, and a modeling enthusiast.
Donna Logan
Program director
Via della Fioraia, 24
52100 Arezzo
Italy
Phone: (+39) 442-2444
E-mail
Donna Logan, completed her undergraduate degree in New York before continuing her graduate work in Florence, Italy. A thirty-year resident of Italy, she has lived and worked in Arezzo since1993. She is an English language lecturer at the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia in Arezzo and director on location of the Italian Studies in Tuscany program since 1996. Over the last ten years her wide-ranging contacts with the local student population, governmental and non-governmental organizations and associations have enriched University of Rochester student experiences in Italy.
Donna Logan has a personal commitment to helping each participant in the Arezzo Program have a unique and enriching study-abroad experience in Italy.
Renato Perucchio
University of Rochester
Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering
Hopeman 415
Phone: (585) 275-4069
Fax: (585) 256-2509
E-mail
Web site
Renato Perucchio is Professor of Mechanical Engineering and of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Rochester. He holds a Doctoral degree in Aeronautical Engineering (Structural) from the University of Pisa, Italy, and a Ph. D. in Civil Engineering (Structural) from Cornell University. He has been on the Rochester faculty since 1984. In 1995 he received the Teacher of the Year Award from the School of Engineering and Applied Science. His research and teaching interests are in computational solid and structural mechanics and in the development of engineering practices in Classical Antiquity. Currently Prof. Perucchio and his students are engaged in two interdisciplinary projects in (a) biomechanics: computational modeling developmental processes in the embryonic heart, and (b) structural and solid mechanics: computational modeling of the mechanics of monumental concrete domes and vaults from Roman Imperial architecture. He has participated in the Arezzo program since its inception in 1994, teaching units related to engineering and technology in the Roman and Medieval World. Since 2003 he directs a special University of Rochester summer program abroad on Roman Structures that takes places in Arezzo and Rome.
Federico Siniscalco
University degli Studi di Siena
Dipartimento di Letterature Moderne e
Scienze dei Linguaggi
Viale Cittadini 33
52100 Arezzo
Italy
Phone: (39) 0575 926437
Fax: (39) 0575 926410
DavID
Federico Siniscalco, born in Naples, teaches American Studies at the University of Siena in Arezzo, Italy. In his work on American culture, and on intercultural communication, he uses documentary film both as a source of information—by researching and studying significant non-fiction films—and as a tool through which to represent various aspects of the USA and its people.
Siniscalco is the founder and director of DavID (Digital audio visual Intercultural Documentation) www.david.unis.it. This research laboratory, created within the University of Siena in 2004, is dedicated to the production, subtitling and archiving of documentary films. Among the works subtitled into Italian and archived by DavID are the Maysles brother’s Salesman, Gimme Shelter, and Grey Gardens, Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back, Bob Drew’s Primary, Adventure’s on the New Frontier, and Crisis, and Les Blank’s Innocents Abroad.
Since 2001 Siniscalco has been on the scientific committee of the Festival dei Popoli (International Documentary Film Festival in Florence, Italy), where he also taught classes on the history of Documentary film. For the Festival Siniscalco coordinated two special events which saw the participation of Albert Maysles (in 2001) and D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus (in 2004).
In 2006 Siniscalco organized a tribute to American Direct Cinema for Engagé Documentary Film Festival in Cortona, Italy. Within this event was a round table on Observational documentary in the digital age, which saw the participation, among others, of documentary filmmakers Ricky Leacock and Bob Drew. Siniscalco has directed and co-directed non-fictional films which deal with such themes as the critical reception of Antonio Gramsci, American Direct Cinema, Italian Americans, and American students in Italy. Currently he is working on a documentary on two Italian African American brothers coming to terms with their mixed cultural heritage.
Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio
University of Rochester
405 Lattimore Hall
Telephone: (585) 275-5723
E-mail
Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio is Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Rochester. She holds a Doctorate in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Florence, Italy, and a Masters and a Ph.D. in Italian from Cornell University. She teaches Italian literature, language, history, and culture. Her major areas of interest are Dante Studies and modern Italian culture. She published nationally and internationally on Dante, Cavalcanti, Pirandello, and Leopardi. Her current research focuses on Dante’s political thinking and the theory of government of the Emperor Frederick II. She is also working on a multimedia Companion to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Since 1993, Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio has been the academic director of the University of Rochester Program in Italian Studies in Arezzo, Italy, that she herself founded.
John H. Thomas
University of Rochester
Mechanical Engineering
John H. Thomas is Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Sciences and of Astronomy at the University of Rochester. He has been on the Rochester faculty since 1967 and served as University Dean of Graduate Studies from 1983 to 1991. He has held visiting positions at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Sydney, and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in Munich, the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, and the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado. He is a past chair (1995-97) of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society and scientific editor (1993-2003) of the Astrophysical Journal. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Thomas’s research interests are in the areas of astrophysical fluid dynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, and solar physics, with particular interest in sunspots and solar magnetism. He has a long-standing interest in the history of science.