Staff & Faculty

Rome Campus Staff

Fay Trachtenberg – Acting Director of the Trinity Rome Campus

Fay holds a B.A. in International Relations from Mount Holyoke College and a Juris Doctorate from Temple University Law School. She studied in Italy at the Trinity College (Barbieri Center) Rome Campus and at the Università per Stranieri, in Perugia.

“I fell in love with Italy when I studied abroad in high school and college and I often tell people that I “grew up” in Rome, despite having spent my childhood in New England. Studying in Rome, at Trinity College Rome Campus my junior year, proved to be a transformational experience. My time abroad taught me invaluable lessons, and most importantly it made me view the world differently. It is an honor and a privilege to be a part of the TCRC team and to be a small part of that same transformation for TCRC students this coming semester. I am very much looking forward to “coming home to Rome.”

Prior to founding the Trachtenberg Consulting Group in 2023, Fay was a senior attorney, educator and administrative advisor at Temple University and Temple University Health System for more than 20 years. Before joining Temple, Fay practiced employment law, specializing in employment discrimination matters. She taught at both Temple Beasley School of Law and Rutgers Law Schools.

Fay currently sits on the board of the Philadelphia Diversity Law Group.

Simon Marin – Acting Academic Director

Simon Martin holds a B.A. in History from Queen Mary and Westfield College (London), an M.A. in Slavonic Studies from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (London) and a Ph.D. from University College London. He completed his doctoral thesis on the topic of football and Fascism in Mussolini’s Italy. Published in 2004, Football and Fascism. The national game under Mussolini’s won the British Society for Sport’s History’s Lord Aberdare prize for literary history. His second book Sport Italia: the Italian Love Affair with Sport was published in 2011 and also won the Lord Aberdare prize, in 2012. His current research is focused upon the memory of Fascism and material culture, and in 2019 he co-edited an edition of Modern Italy dedicated to ‘Difficult Heritage’. His third book examines memory and martyrdom in Fascist Italy. Il Martire. Storia di Giovanni Berta will be published in Italian in 2024 by Laterza. Specialized in contemporary Italian history, Fascism, memory and sport, he has taught at University College London, the University of Hertfordshire, the University of Buckingham, the University of Roma Tre and a number of US university programs in Italy. At Trinity College Rome Campus, professor Martin teaches Sports and Society, Italy’s Holocaust, Mussolini’s Rome and Monuments and Power.

Francesco Ciccarelli – IT Specialist & Librarian

Francesco Ciccarelli is the hub of information technology and library services at the Rome Campus.

A computing enthusiast and consummate trouble-shooter, he keeps the Rome Campus ahead of the curve in IT and gives full individual attention to each student’s set-up and needs.

Flavia Alfano – Student Affairs Assistant

Flavia Alfano holds a BA in Linguistic and Intercultural Mediation from the Sapienza University in Rome and she is currently studying for her MA in linguistic, literary and translation sciences. Her native language is Italian. She studied French and Spanish at school, while now she’s focusing more on improving her English and German. She has already worked at Trinity College Rome Campus as University Partner in 2022, a role that allowed her to grow both personally and professionally. Now she is really excited about the opportunity to learn even more and gain experience as Resident Assistant.

Flavia loves reading, traveling and meeting new people as ways to embrace diversity and experience cultural exchange

Rome Campus Faculty

Giorgio Capriotti

Giorgio Capriotti holds a PhD in Art History from the Sapienza University of Rome and an advanced degree in conservation and restoration of painted surfaces on several supports and on lithic materials from the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome. He is a professor at the University of Tuscia in Viterbo, where he teaches theory and techniques of restoration. He is director of the restoration laboratory for the district of Viterbo. He has a many years of practical experience as a conservator in the field of mural paintings and has carried out many large projects for private and public institutions in Italy and abroad, including work on the Tomb of Nefertari (Luxor,Egypt) for The Getty Conservation Institute; the Tomb of Amenophi III (Luxor,Egypt) for Unesco / Waseda Tokio University; the Tomb of Tyr (Beirut, Lebanon) for the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Italian Cooperation; the St. Theodore Church (Byblos, Lebanon) for the American Embassy in Lebanon; Bernini’s high altar  in St. Andrew at Quirinale (Rome) for the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage; the Mosque of Hashrafje , (Taiz, Yemen) for Unesco; St. Peter Basilica, Necropolis (Vatican City – Rome) for Rev. Fabrica of St. Peter; Carracci’s Gallery at Farnese Palace (Rome) -for the World Monument Fund. He is also Consultant for International institutions as ICCROM, The Getty Conservation Institute, UNESCO and author of several publications related to professional reporting and scientific/ historical research. At Trinity College Rome Campus, he teaches a course on Art Conservation together with his partner and colleague, Lorenza D’Alessandro, and leads students in the on-site restoration project, The Trinity College Santa Sabina Monitoring Project. [email protected]

Paolo Chirichigno has been teaching Italian language and culture with a number of American Universities and programs in Rome for more than 15 years. He is currently the Italian department coordinator at Temple University of Rome. He bases his approach to language instruction on the close connection between language and the place where it is spoken, emphasizing the role of language as a way to know different cultures and people. He has participated in several professional training courses, including an intensive SOAR (Student Oriented Redesign Project) Course at Center for the Advancement of Teaching (Temple Philadelphia). At Trinity College Rome Campus, professor Chirichigno teaches various levels of Italian language and Culture. [email protected]

Lorenza D’Alessandro

Lorenza D’Alessandro holds a PhD in Art History from the Sapienza University of Rome and an advanced degree in conservation and restoration of painted surfaces on several supports and on lithic materials from the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome. She is a professor at the University of Tuscia in Viterbo, where he teaches theory and techniques of restoration. From 2009-2012, she served as the President of the Association for Restoration in Abruzzo, which had the task of securing and safeguarding important works damaged in the Aquila earthquake of 2009. Since 2012, she has been a conservator with Marignoli di Montecorona Foundation in Spoleto. She has a many years of practical experience as a conservator in the of easel paintings (canvas and panels) and mural paintings from ancient times up through contemporary art. Her restoration projects have included works by Giotto, Andrea Mantegna, Raffaello Sanzio, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Andrea del Sarto, F. Barocci, Annibale Carracci, Pietro da Cortona, Guido Reni, Luca Giordano, Anton Van Dyck, Mattia Preti, Salvator Rosa, Giovanni Lanfranco, Carlo Maratta, Anton Rafael Mengs, David Roberts, Morandi, De Chirico, Balla, Boldini, and Pirandello. She has also worked on large-scale projects for private and public institution in Italy and abroad, including projects on: the Tomb of Nefertari (Luxor, Egypt) ; Bernini’s high altar in St. Andrew at Quirinale (Rome); Federico Barocci, The Casino of Pope Pius IV, (Vatican); St. Peter Basilica: Necropolis, “Our Lady of Help”;  and the Ancient wooden Crucifix (Vatican). She is a consultant for institutions such as ICCROM, The Getty Conservation Institute, Vatican Basilica (Fabrica di San Pietro) and author of several publications related to professional report and scientific/ historical search. At Trinity College Rome Campus, she teaches a course on Art Conservation together with her partner and colleague, Giorgio Capriotti, and leads students in the on-site restoration project, The Trinity College Santa Sabina Monitoring Project. [email protected]

Valentina Dorato

Valentina Dorato has completed her Ph.D. thesis on Digital Humanities and Pedagogy in the department of Social Research and Communication of the Sapienza University of Rome.  During her doctorate she created a new experimental online pedagogical instrument called “RomanaMENTE” with the objective of using the digital world and the city of Rome to teach Italian language in a way that emphasizes the connection between languages, cultures and places. She also has a Master in Second language Teaching from the Roma Tre University and a second-level DITALS certificate for second languages. She is author of the book Cantando si impara, a textbook for teaching Italian language thorough Music (not published yet) and some articles on Digital Humanities and Pedagogy. At Trinity College Rome Campus, she teaches Italian Language and Culture courses and a summer course on Food and Culture. [email protected]

Cristiana Filippini

Cristiana Filippini is an art historian specialized in medieval art and architecture. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and an B.A. in History of Art from the University of Florence, Italy. Her primary field of research is medieval art in Rome, while her research and teaching interests also include 17th-century art in Rome, women’s presence in the art of Rome, and museum history in Rome. She has given several papers and published articles on the subject of Roman art of the Middle Ages, in particular on the issue of narrative strategies in the painting of the Papal city. Her current research projects include a monograph on the frescoes of San Clemente in Rome and a co-authored study of another important medieval Roman mural decoration, the frescoes of Santa Maria Immacolata at Ceri. At Trinity College Rome Campus, professor Filippini teaches Rome through the Ages. Art and Architecture of the Eternal City and a course on Women and Art. [email protected]

Elena Fossà

Elena Fossà earned her B.A. in Pedagogy at the Libera Università degli Studi Maria SS. Assunta (LUMSA) in Rome. She has taught literature at the high school level in Siena and Italian language to foreigners at the Centro Linguistico Dante Alighieri in Siena and in Rome. She has been Professor of Italian language and Culture at the Trinity College Rome Campus for 30 years, served as Interim Director for the program in 2016 and is currently the program’s Internship Coordinator. [email protected]

Jan Gadeyne

Jan Gadeyne holds a Ph.D. in Archaeology and Ancient Art History and an M.A. in Classics from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Louvain, Belgium).  He also studied late antique art and archaeology at the Westfälische Wilhelmsuniversität Münster (Germany). He came to Rome in 1987 with a grant of the Italian government and studied early Christian Archaeology at the Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana. Since 1988 he has been teaching for several American study abroad programs, including Temple University, Cornell University, the University of Miami, Arcadia University and Trinity College, and for summer architecture programs, including Yale University, the University of Maryland and Tunghai University (Taiwan). His courses embrace Ancient Roman Art and Architecture, Urban History of Rome in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Late antique and early Byzantine Art and Architecture, Ancient History of Rome and the Mediterranean. Recently, he has become part of a research group for the study and promotion of the Aurelian wall in collaboration with the department of Architecture of the Sapienza University of Rome. Since 2005, he is co-director of the excavation of the Roman villa on the Piano della Civita in Artena (40 miles southeast of Rome). The title of his Ph.D. in Archaeology and Ancient Art History is “Function and dysfunction of the City: Rome in the 5^th century AD.” He has published papers on Roman lead seals, Early Christian apse mosaics, the formation of the street system in Early Medieval Rome and (especially) on the excavations of the Roman villa at Artena. He has co-edited, together with Gregory Smith, Perspectives on Public Space in Rome, from Antiquity to the Present Day, published by Ashgate in 2013. He is also one of the officers of the Rome charter of the Archaeological Institute of America. At Trinity College Rome Campus, he teaches The Ancient Art of Rome, The City of Rome, and Continuity and Transformation of the Ancient Mediterranean: Rome, Constantinople and Damascus. [email protected]

Anna Gorchakovskaya

Anna Gorchakovskaya is an independent researcher, curator and teacher currently based in Rome. She holds a degree in Art History from the University of Bologna (2016) and a master’s degree in Gender Studies from the Roma Tre University (2019). In 2016 Anna collaborated with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice as an Assistant Events Coordinator. Between 2016 and 2020 Anna collaborated with the curatorial space Adiacenze based in Bologna. As part of curatorial team of Adiacenze, Anna contributed to numerous exhibition projects of the space. Between 2018 and 2021 Anna collaborated with the Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and contributed, as a curator, researcher, editor and translator, to its curatorial and editorial projects. Among other exhitibitions, Anna has contributed to the design and organization of Io dico Io – I say I, Women Up, Cosmowomen. In 2020-2021 Anna curated the show Out of Focus that took place at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and was the Assistant Curator of the show Bigger than Myself. Heroic Voices from Ex-Yugoslavia at MAXXI. In 2021 Anna Gorchakovskaya co-founded On Site, a project aimed at bringing together the international realities of the city of Rome and the local Roman artistic and cultural scene. Recently, she served as a coordinator for the project Pier Paolo Pasolini. Tutto è santo and an Assistant Curator for the show Pier Paolo Pasolini. Tutto è santo. Corpo politico at MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. She currently teaches a course on contemporary art in Rome with Cornell University. At Trinity College Rome Campus, Anna teaches Art and Activism in Rome.

Chiara Lucarelli

Chiara Lucarelli holds a degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures from University of Roma Tre as well as an M.A. in Anglo-Irish Literature and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literatures from University College Dublin (Ireland). Her research interests span from Italian, English and American Literature, to Cinema and Cultural studies and she has published several articles on literary magazines. During the course of the past few years she has taught courses for various Study Abroad programs in Rome, among which: Travel Literature, English and American Writers in Italy, Introduction to Italian Culture, Italian Culture and Media, Italian Cinema, Community Engagement and Internship: A Comparative Approach to the Italian Workforce. At Trinity College Rome Campus, she teaches a course on Contemporary Italy through Cinema. [email protected]

Simon Martin

Simon Martin holds a B.A. in History from Queen Mary and Westfield College (London), an M.A. in Slavonic Studies from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (London) and a Ph.D. from University College London. He completed his doctoral thesis, which was later developed into a book, on the topic of football and Fascism in Mussolini’s Italy. Published in 2004, Football and Fascism won the British Society for Sport’s History’s Lord Aberdare prize for literary history. His second book Sport Italia: the Italian Love Affair with Sport was published in 2011 and also won the Lord Aberdare prize, in 2012. His current research is focused upon the memory of Fascism through material culture. In 2019 he co-edited an edition of Modern Italy dedicated to ‘Difficult Heritage’ and is currently writing a third book examining memory and martyrdom on Fascist Italy. Specialized in contemporary Italian history, cultural history, memory and sport, he has taught at University College London, the University of Hertfordshire, the University of Roma Tre and a number of US university programs in Italy. He is co-Director of the University of Buckingham’s Masters in the History of Sport by Research and is a Research Fellow at the British School at Rome. At Trinity College Rome Campus, professor Martin teaches Sports and Society, Mussolini’s Rome, History Wars and Italy’s Holocaust. [email protected]

Valentino Pace

Valentino Pace is Trinity College Rome Campus’ longest serving professor. A renowned scholar in his field, professor Pace has been teaching with Trinity’s Rome program since 1975. A graduate of the Sapienza University of Rome, he is a professor emeritus of Medieval and Byzantine Art at the University of Udine where he began teaching in 1998. He has served as a visiting professor and fellow in numerous Italian and international institutions, including Humboldt University of Berlin, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, the Sapienza University of Rome, Roma Tre University, the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. He has been Research-Professor (“Richard-Krautheimer-Gastprofessur”) at the Bibliotheca Hertziana. Since 2003 he is Foreign Member of the Academy of Sciences and Letters at the University of Oslo. In 2010 he has received an Award  “for distinguished Research in the field of Medieval and Byzantine Art History” from the University of Belgrade. He has published and edited a number of books and more than 250 articles (essays, proceedings, reviews) in international journals. [email protected]

Fabio Padovano

Fabio Padovano holds a Ph.D. in Economics at George Mason University, where he was Research Assistant to Nobel Laureate James Buchanan, and a doctorate in Quantitative Methods from the Sapienza University of Rome. He is Professor of Public Finance at the University of Roma Tre and Director of the Centre Condorcet for Political Economy, at the University of Rennes 1, France. He has served as Visiting Professor at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Maryland, George Mason University, the  University of Fribourg, and was an Academic Visitor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Professeur Invité at the Université de Rennes1. He has been invited to deliver courses on public finance and public choice in various universities internationally, including in the U.S., China, Republic of South Korea, France, Great Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany. In Italy he taught at the Universities LUISS Guido Carli, University of Lecce, University of l’Aquila and at the Sapienza University of Rome.  He has been President of the European Public Choice Society (2009-11) and a former Board member of the Italian Society of Public Economics (SIEP). He serves on the Board of Editors of the journals Public Choice, Constitutional Political Economy and European Journal of Government and Economics. He acts as referee for Cambridge University Press, European Journal of Political Economy, Public Choice, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Cultural Economics, Regional Studies, European Journal of Law and Economics, Il Giornale degli Economisti and more. He is author of several dozen articles in international scholarly journals such as Public Choice, European Journal of Political Economy, Economics of Governance, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Economic Inquiry, European Economic Review, Constitutional Political Economy, International Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, Journal of Cultural Economics as well as of two volumes: Italian Institutional Reforms: A Public Choice Perspective (New York, Springer, 2008 [with Roberto Ricciuti]) and Politics and Economics of Regional Transfers (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2008). At Trinity College Rome Campus, he teaches courses on Public Choice, The Economics of Religions, The Economics of Art and Public Finance. [email protected]

Livio Pestilli

Livio Pestilli holds a M.A. in English Literature from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Art History from the Sapienza University of Rome. He has published extensively on a wide range of artists, such as Cavallini, Michelangelo, Bernini, Michael Sweerts, Paolo de Matteis, and authors such as Pliny, Vasari, Bellori and Lord Shaftesbury. He has also written a number of essays on a frequent but often overlooked socio-anthropological theme in Italian art: the representation of the orthopedically impaired body. He is the co-editor with Sebastian Schütze and Ingrid Rowland of the volume “Napoli is the World”.  Neapolitan Art and Culture from Humanism to the Enlightenment (2003) and the author of the monograph Paolo de Matteis: Neapolitan Painting and Cultural History in Baroque Europe (Ashgate, 2013). In 2017 he published an interdisciplinary book by the title Picturing the Lame in Italian Art from Antiquity to the Modern Era (Ashgate/Routledge) and has recently completed a book on Bernini and His World that should see the light in 2021. Prof. Pestilli directed the Trinity College Rome Campus for 37 years, until the fall of 2016. He currently teaches courses on Renaissance and Baroque Art: Michelangelo and His World and Bernini and His World. [email protected]

Danica Pušić

Danica Pušić received her Ph.D. in Linguistics at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. She received her M.A. at the University La Sapienza in Rome and a B.A. in Classical Studies at the University of Belgrade. In 2011, she was an Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She has been teaching since at Trinity College Rome Campus, Temple University Rome, and John Cabot University. Danica Pušić’s research focuses on linguistic issues regarding Latin and Greek verbal aspectology. She also published the translation into Serbo-Croatian of Nicolaus Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). This is the first complete translation into Serbo-Croatian of the work from the original Latin. Professor Pušić won the Open Society Institute’s Grants for three years for research-focused social and political interest topics for the Balkans. She is also the official translator and interpreter at the Rome Criminal Tribunal (Italian – Serbo-Croatian; Serbo-Croatian – Italian). At TCRC, Danica Pušić teaches Love and Eros in Ancient Rome and tutorials in Latin and Ancient Greek at all levels. [email protected]

Eszter Salgó

Eszter Salgó holds a B.A. and a M.A. in International Affairs and Art History and a Ph.D. in Political Science. Since 2007 she has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses at both private and public universities on various topics, including World Politics, International Organizations, the European Union, Politics and Psychology, Comparative Politics and Identity Politics. In her research, professor Salgó explores the intersections between art and politics, the symbolic and the mythological construction of social communities, the emotionalization, and the dramatization and sacralization of politics through the lens of social sciences, anthropology, art theory and psychoanalysis. Her recent publications include: “Simone Leigh’s Postcolonial Challenge in the Center of New York City” (Postmedia Books, March 2020); “Images from Paradise: the Visual Communication of the European Union’s Federalist Utopia” (Berghahn Books 2017); and “Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in Mothers’ Hands” (Routledge 2014). At Trinity College Rome Campus, professor Salgó teaches European Union: History, Political Economy, and Society. [email protected]

Carlotta Silvagni

Carlotta Silvagni holds a B.A. in the Literature of Cinema and Theatre from the Sapienza University of Rome and a M.A., as a Fulbright Scholar, in Integrated Marketing Communication from Emerson College in Boston. After working for eight years as a copywriter in several leading advertising agencies in Rome, she earned a diploma for teaching Italian as a Second Language from Dilit International House of Rome and obtained the DITALS Certificate, Second Level. Since 2003 she has been teaching Italian for several American Universities and private foreign companies. At Trinity College Rome Campus, professor Silvagni teaches various levels of Italian language and Culture. [email protected]

Piero Vereni

Piero Vereni is an associate professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Rome – Tor Vergata. He earned a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1998 doing fieldwork in Western Greek Macedonia. He has also done fieldwork (1998-1999) between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland while working as a research assistant at the Queen’s University of Belfast. His current scholarship is focused on prisons in Italy; squats in Rome; Bangladeshi immigrants in Rome; and religious diversity in Rome. Since 2019 he has been nominated Representative of the Dean of the University of Rome – Tor Vergata for the social center “polo culturale ex Fienile,” where he is the director of LaPE Ethnographic Practices Lab. His most recent publications include: La ninfa e lo scoglio. Riflessioni sul senso dell’antropologia culturale, Roma, Universitalia, 2018; “Etnografie in biblioteca. Verso una nuova rilevanza del sapere antropologico,” in David Graeber e Marshall Sahlins, I, Milano, Cortina, pp. I-XXII, 2019; (con Giulia Casentini), “Lo spazio, il diverso, la sicurezza. note antropologiche sul controllo simbolico dei flussi migratori,” Documenti geografici, [S.l.], n. 2, p. 67-86, feb. 2020.  At Trinity College Rome Campus, professor Vereni teaches Urban and Global Rome and works with students participating in the internship at the LaPE Ethnographic Practices Lab he directs. [email protected]