Vanessa Fanelli

LANGUAGE INSTRUCTOR

Vanessa Fanelli has been teaching Italian for the America-ITaly Society of Philadelphia since 2021. For AIS she has taught and curated citizenship classes (CP-4 and CP-10), and all levels language classes. She is also a  Lecturer for the Department of French and Italian at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests focus on gender studies, and feminist and postfeminist theories, film and media theory, and audience reception. She received her Ph.D. in the summer of 2022. Her dissertation, titled “Beyond the Casting Couch: A feminist recovery of female stars’ experience in Italy,” is an interdisciplinary inquiry on female stardom in Italy with particular focus on gender representation and production practices between the 1950s and 1960s.
Central to her teaching philosophy is the concept of community learning. Her ideal classroom is a collaborative environment, where both the students and the teacher contribute to and learn from the discussion on the basis of mutual respect. "My role as a teacher is to support my students and make them believe in themselves because they can do it!"