Professor of Italian Literature and Comparative Literature at Cornell University (New York), faculty fellow of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and member of the Climate Change Focus Group. Her intense research activity has crossed different fields of study: from the role of labor, automation and repetition in Italian design, art and of the 1960s, to recent idiosyncratic research projects on energy (Fuel) and climate change, along the disciplinary ridge between geography, geology, cinema, political theory and literature.
Among her publications Picturing Silence: Emblem, Language, Counter-Reformation Materiality (University of Michigan Press 1996); Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising Under Fascism (University of Minnesota Press 1995); The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini’s Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2003); Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence (Stanford University Press, 2009). She also translates writings from Italian, including: Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death, with Michael Hardt (University of Minnesota Press, 1991) and Renato Barilli, A Course in Aesthetics (University of Minnesota Press, 1993).