Tutor in Italian Language, Contemporary Culture and Society

I lived in Italy for three years doing historical research for my PhD on fascism and resistance. As well as qualifying as an Italian translator and interpreter, a later spin-off of my time in Italy, was research on urban cultural policies, where I interviewed local artists, cultural politicians and activists in Rome, Bologna and Turin. My journalistic translation focused on industrial automation and robotics in Olivetti and Fiat, while my book translations included an oral history of fascism, feminist film and social theory. I returned to Italy for over 25 years on research projects on local urban cultures and on cultural strategies of city councils. I also free-lanced as a telephone interpreter for doctors' surgeries, hospitals, courts and social services. So I have wide experience of Italian language and contemporary society as well as history, which I bring into my teaching, selecting topics according to the range of student interests. I use role play and enactment of scenes to encourage active absorption of new vocabulary, grammar and phrases, and draw on a wide range of literary and journalistic texts to show different registers and styles of the language as well as diverse topics to enhance spoken fluency. By integrating into the class short writing exercises on the specific discussion topics, students have the opportunity to test out new linguistic structures and idioms they have just learnt, and integrate them into their own expressive voice. So the classes focus both on learning new linguistic and lexical structures and on their rapid application in speech and writing.