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Giorgia Buscema

First Year Italian Ph.D. Student

Giorgia Buscema photo
Email
gbuscema@nd.edu

Biography

Giorgia Buscema is a second-year Master’s student in Italian Studies. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Italian Studies at Roma Tre University, where she wrote her thesis in Latin literature on the humanized portrayal of gods and goddesses in Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae. She later completed a Master’s degree in Italian Philology, focusing on Petrarch’s engagement with Cicero’s rhetorical work De Inventione as mediated by the grammaticus Marius Victorinus. Her thesis presented a critical edition of Petrarch’s notes on Marius Victorinus’ Explanationes in Ciceronis Rhetoricam (ms. Par. Lat. 7748), along with a study of their connections to Petrarch’s other works, especially the Familiares and Seniles letters.

Her current research focuses on lexical resemanticization in Dante. For her Master’s thesis, she is investigating the semantic development and symbolic function of a key term in pre-Dantean lyric poetry and examining how Dante reworks it into a pivotal structural and symbolic element across the Commedia, with particular attention to its renewed significance in the Paradiso.

In addition to her work on Dante, Giorgia is also interested in modern and contemporary Italian literature. Some of her research focuses on the intersections of life, art, and femininity in authors such as Gabriele D’Annunzio, comparing his aestheticization of female characters with Flaubert’s literary realism. She also studies how Mario Soldati represents Italy and abroad, blending personal experience with symbolic and allegorical figures.

Alongside her academic work, Giorgia has pursued her passion for teaching and Second Language Acquisition. She taught Italian in France for the 2023–2024 academic year and has already taught two semesters of Beginning Italian I at Notre Dame. She is currently teaching Beginning Italian II, sharing her enthusiasm for the Italian language and culture with her students.

Research Interests

Late-Antique Latin Literature; Italian Philology; Medieval Italian Literature; Dante Studies; Modern & Contemporary Italian Literature; Second Language Acquisition.