Tessa Gurney
Language Coordinator: Italian
Assistant Teaching Professor of Italian
- Office
- 301 Decio Faculty Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556 - Phone
- 574-631-6450
- tgurney@nd.edu
Education
Ph.D. in Romance Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2016)
BA in Italian, International Studies, and Professional Writing, The Ohio State University (2008)
Biography
Tessa Gurney received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2016).
At Notre Dame since 2024, Professor Gurney is enthusiastic about creative pedagogical methods and teaches Italian language courses at all levels, employing a collaborative, project-based approach to each class. She believes passionately in the transformative power of language and cultural study paired with experiential learning abroad and has developed and taught several faculty-led study abroad trips to Sicily in which students examine the Sicilian palimpsest.
Her research places early modern Italian theater in the larger Mediterranean context, and she is particularly interested in the representation of the Turkish Other in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian comedy. Such scholarship informs her teaching, as she encourages students of Italian language to go beyond traditional understandings of Italian culture and make connections between the Italian Peninsula and the vast and diverse Mediterranean world that surrounds it.
Research Interests
Second-language acquisition and language pedagogy, Renaissance Theater, Mediterranean Studies, Food Studies
Representative Publications
“Travel, Servitude, and Female Agency in Early Modern Comedy of Conflict” Representations of Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Italian Literature. Ed. Suzanne Magnanini. U of Deleware Press, 2024.
“Echoes of Wartime in Late Sixteenth-Century Italian Comedy.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 24, no. 1 (2018): 155-175.
“Performing the Mediterranean in Giovan Battista Andreini’s Lo Schiavetto.” The Grand Ducal Medici and the Levant. Eds. Marta Caroscio and Maurizio Arfaioli. Brepols: Turnhour, Belgium, 2017.