Overview
Dr. Pierpaolo Spagnolo has been an instructor and a Language Corridor Advisor of Italian at Duke University since Fall 2021. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Italian, English, and French Languages and Literatures at the University of Salento (Italy); two master’s degrees, the first in Research in Language and Literature Teaching at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain), and the second one in Romance Languages (Italian and Spanish) at the University of Oregon, where he also obtained a SLAT (Second Language Acquisition Teaching) certificate. He recently obtained his Ph.D. in Italian and Medieval Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign defending his doctoral dissertation titled Relics and Religious Artifacts: The Materiality of Holy Bodies in Italian Culture from 14th century Novella to Modern Film. His work offers a new perspective on the centrality of relics and religious artifacts in literary and filmic texts from Medieval to the Modern worlds.