Annick Paternoster

Annick Paternoster is a Lecturer at the Institute of Italian Studies (ISI) within the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society at the University of Italian Switzerland (USI), where she has taught since the institute's founding in 2007. She holds a PhD in Romance Language and Literature from the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

• PhD in Romance Language and Literature, University of Antwerp

Her research bridges stylistics, pragmatics, and cultural history, specializing in the linguistic structure of literary dialogue, historical (im)politeness, and metapragmatic discourse in etiquette manuals. She analyzes how prescriptive texts like rhetorical treatises and schoolbooks reflect evolving social norms across Western cultures from the 14th to 20th centuries, with particular focus on Italian and French contexts.

Recent publications reveal a cohesive trajectory examining politeness binaries through historical lenses, combining corpus linguistics with cultural analysis. Her work spans book chapters on face theory, journal articles on discernment frameworks, and the 2022 monograph on 19th-century etiquette books, all emphasizing diachronic shifts in communicative norms.

Paternoster secured Swiss National Science Foundation funding for 'The Reasons of Politeness' (2014-2019) and co-organized the 2024 Historical Im/Politeness Research conference. She mentors through collaborative projects rather than formal student supervision.

She co-developed the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Italian Galatei (CGIO) and curated the 'Soavi Costumes, Dolci Manners' exhibition at Lugano Cantonal Library, demonstrating commitment to public scholarship through BBC appearances and academic outreach.