College Up Close: Pina Gemboni, Romance studies

“As someone who is passionate about both research and teaching, I was absolutely thrilled to be able to merge my interests at Carolina,” said Pina Gemboni, a Ph.D. student in the Romance studies department.

Gemboni, who is from Pompei in Naples, Italy, originally found UNC through a year-long exchange program.

“However, in the department of Romance studies, I found myself in an intellectually stimulating environment surrounded by supportive professors, exceptional students and fantastic colleagues,” she said.

Gemboni’s academic focuses are postcolonial studies, Mediterranean studies and second language acquisition. The topics are the crux of her work as an Italian instructor and her dissertation  research.

Specifically, her dissertation explores direct postcolonial literature, “which refers to the cultural production of authors who come from former Italian colonies in Africa, or whose families migrated to Italy from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Libya,” shared Gemboni.

Through her research, she argues that “postcolonial writers in Italy recontextualize and remap spaces and places to reappropriate and decolonize the narrative space related to Italy’s colonial past, which was suppressed from public discourse.”

Beyond her Ph.D. research, Gemboni teaches Italian at all levels at UNC.

“I absolutely love teaching the language and seeing my students progress from basic vocabulary to more complex sentences that allow them to have short conversations in Italian,” she said, adding that she is also teaching a Spanish 101 class this semester.

In her classes, she hopes that adding discussions about Italian culture encourages her students to someday visit Italy.

When she thinks of her favorite UNC memory, she remembers a day on the quad with her undergraduate students in her “Intermediate Accelerated Italian” class. 

“We all learned this beautiful song in Italian, and by the end of the semester, we went out to the quad, sat down and sang it together,” she said. “It was such a wonderful and rewarding experience.”

By Jess Abel ’19

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