Catherine Sama

Catherine Sama is Professor of Italian & Film Media and Head of the Italian Program at the University of Rhode Island, where she has taught since completing her Ph.D. at Brown University. Her research and teaching integrate Italian literature, cinema, digital humanities, and gender studies, with a particular focus on Venetian women writers and artists of the Enlightenment.

Education

• Ph.D. Italian Studies, Brown University (1995)
• B.A. French major, Italian minor, University of Virginia (1985)

Research Interests

Professor Sama’s scholarship centres on early-modern Italian women writers and artists, Italian cinematic history from Neorealism to the present, and the Italian Resistance movement. She is currently developing a limited-series podcast that reconstructs the experiences of women partisans in the Veneto who collaborated with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, drawing on de-classified military documents, private correspondence, and oral histories.

Her digital-humanities work explores correspondence networks and online language-learning platforms, aiming to enhance learner autonomy through innovative technologies such as live video exchanges with native speakers.

Grants & Awards

• National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship (2014)
• URI Foundation Teaching Excellence Award (2017)

Advising & Grants

Although no individual advisees are listed in the provided text, Professor Sama has secured major external funding (NEH, AAUW) and spearheads collaborative digital projects that engage graduate and undergraduate researchers in archival and multimedia work.

Labs & Teams

She leads the Italian Program at URI and participates in interdisciplinary initiatives that bridge the Department of Modern & Classical Languages and Literatures with Digital Humanities and Gender Studies clusters on campus.