Rhiannon Noel Welch

Rhiannon Noel Welch serves as Associate Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, holding the Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair of Italian Literature and acting as Graduate Advisor. She maintains affiliate faculty appointments in Film & Media, Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender, and Folklore.

Her research centers on intersections of modern Italian literature, film, and critical theory with race, colonialism, and biopolitics. Welch's seminal work Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy (2016) fundamentally repositions race as central to Italian modernity rather than a fascist deviation. Her current project Reverberation and the Anticolonial Imagination develops 'reverberation' as an aesthetic and critical framework for understanding how historical violence persists through sensory experience in contemporary works.

Welch's scholarly contributions have been recognized through major research support:

• American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
• Mellon Foundation Grant
• Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellowship
• Cornell University Institute of European Studies Grant
• Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences Grant

As Graduate Advisor, Welch mentors students while teaching innovative courses including "Entangled Pasts at the Border: Aesthetics, Race, and Migration," "Italian Cinema and the Ecological Imagination," and "Race, Biopolitics, and the 'Making' of Italians." Her pedagogy bridges literary analysis, visual culture, and critical race studies through examinations of neorealism, migration narratives, and postcolonial theory.