Faculty and Administration
- Jump to information about:
- Asish R. Basu
- Monica Capacci
- Gregory Conti
- Gloria Convertito
- Marcello D'Andrea
- Donna Logan
- Renato Perucchio
- Irene Schiatti
- Federico Siniscalco
- Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio
- David Walsh
Asish R. Basu
University of Rochester
Earth & Environmental Sciences
Asish Basu is Professor of Geological Science at the University of Rochester. He has been on the Rochester faculty since 1978 and was Chair of the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences from 1986-1998. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Volcanology, Geochemistry, and Petrology Section of the American Geophysical Union during 1998-2004. His research has yielded significant insights into continental flood volcanisms in Siberia 251 million years ago and in India 66 million years ago that also coincided with two of the largest mass extinctions in the history of life. He and his students are currently studying active volcanism in the East African Rift Valley and the history and nature of the Pacific plate subduction along the western continental margin of California.
Monica Capacci
University of Siena/Arezzo
Art History
Monica Capacci holds a degree in Renaissance Art History as well as Foreign Languages and Literatures from the Facoltà di Lettere, University of Siena, Italy. A long-time collaborator of the Italian Studies in Arezzo program, she teaches Renaissance Art history in 2009.
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
Gloria Convertito obtained her degree in Italian Literature from the Università degli studi di Genova in 1991. Since 1989, she has attended specialized courses and been awarded numerous teaching certificates (1993,1994 and 1995) from the Università per Stranieri di Siena. She began teaching Italian language and culture to foreign people at the Regione Liguria, at a private school in Florence, at the Università per Stranieri di Siena, at the Regione Toscana and the Province of Arezzo. In 1998 she founded the Italian Department at the Accadmia Britannica in Arezzo and has since been the director of that department. Since 2001, she has organized Italian courses within the University of Rochester Study Abroad Program.
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. 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 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 thirteen 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.
Irene Schiatti
University of Rochester
Italian Instructor
Assistant Director
Irene Schiatti is a native Aretine. She has completed her undergraduate and graduate work at the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia in Arezzo in Modern Languages and Cultures. Irene is a study-abroad enthusiast. She was visiting instructor from Arezzo at the University of Rochester during the Spring of 2007 and shadowed the director of the program in the Fall of that same year. Irene will collaborate with the Fall ‘09 ‘Italian Studies in Tuscany’ program as Italian instructor and assistant director of the program.
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.
David Walsh
University of Rochester
Professor of Art History
414 Morey Hall
Telephone: (585) 275-4285
Email
After undergraduate work in history, art history and studio art, David Walsh went to the University of Minnesota to earn his MA and PhD in the Department of Art History. At Minnesota, graduate students were required to do advanced work in one or two fields outside their concentration; he chose Medieval History and Classics. His doctoral dissertation was a stylistic and iconographic study of the Italian bronze doors of Barisanus of Trani who worked in Sicily and southern Italy at the end of the twelfth century. During his graduate years, he also participated in the excavations at Diocletian’s Palace in Split, Yugoslavia. With his appointment at the University of Rochester, he continued teaching in a wide range of subjects and disciplines including architecture, archaeology, history and art history, on both an undergraduate and graduate level. In research, he has been collaborating with archaeologists on the site of Bordesley Abbey in England for nearly forty years. Recent work has also been at Cluny, site of the largest abbey in western Europe, and he is now contemplating work at Autun in Burgundy. His special interests include proportional systems in medieval buildings and the transmission of information in the Middle Ages, Romanesque and Gothic sculpture, the reconstruction of architecture and church furniture, and the historiography of medieval art.
