Elena MATTEI

Elena Mattei is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, holding dual affiliations with the Venice School of Management and the Department of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural Studies. She is actively engaged in the National Research Project DIETALY (Destination Italy in English Translation and Language over the Years) in collaboration with the Italian National Tourist Board, investigating early English tourism translation practices in Italy and 20th century promotional materials.

Her educational background includes a PhD and Doctor Europaeus in Digital Humanities for English Studies (SSD: L-LIN/12) from the University of Verona with excellent grades. Previously, she earned a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Foreign Languages for Communication in Tourism and Commerce (LM-38; 110L/110), with semesters abroad at University of Massachusetts Boston and Universitaet Passau, and an internship at the travel agency One Food Abroad in Dublin.

Mattei's research focuses on multimodal tourism discourse, particularly the collection, annotation and analysis of tourism multimodal corpora on social media. Her work integrates data-driven semiotics into social semiotics and Systemic Functional Linguistics, with the social mission of fostering multimodal literacy and promoting the design of counternarratives for social change, especially regarding environmental protection and informed social media use. She investigates how the capitalist, romantic gaze of the postmodern traveler may be leveraged to cultivate environmental awareness and promote sustainable behavior, with plans to create a Grammar of multimodal eco-discourse to support regenerative travel.

Her publications demonstrate a consistent trajectory in multimodal analysis of tourism communication, with increasing focus on sustainability, environmental protection, and the application of computational methods. Recent work shows a shift toward practical applications of her theoretical framework for regenerative tourism and sustainable communication practices, with numerous forthcoming publications in high-impact journals and edited volumes.

• Finalist for the Paul Fortier Prize as Emerging Researcher in Digital Humanities at Digital Humanities 2023
• Shortlisted for the ADHO Paul Fortier Prize as an emergent scholar in Digital Humanities
• Editorial member of scientific journals TRANS-KATA and Iperstoria (Class A)
• Peer reviewer for Routledge, Bloomsbury Academic, and several high-impact journals

Mattei actively supervises Master's theses at the University of Verona on topics related to tourism discourse and multimodal communication. She has served as an Adjunct Professor at both the University of Verona and Ca' Foscari University of Venice, teaching courses in Digital Humanities, Business English, and English for International Business and Global Affairs. Her research is supported by the DIETALY project funded by MIUR (PRIN 2020), where she serves as a Postdoctoral Researcher under Professor Mirella Agorni.

She has developed the Statistically Reliable Image (SRI) Tagging software for visual and multimodal manual annotation in collaboration with ISTI-CNR, and has co-organized international conferences including a multidisciplinary doctoral conference at the University of Verona in 2021. Her work bridges academia and industry through collaborations with Randstad Research and media appearances with La Repubblica discussing sustainable tourism trends.