Arianna Fognani teaches Italian language and courses on translation and cinema in the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores space, identity, and culture in relation to various forms of mobility—including migration, exploration, exile, and tourism. She focuses on Italy’s recent cultural and political challenges within the Mediterranean context, as well as transnational migration across North Africa (particularly Egypt) and former Italian colonies. Her recent publications include “Navigating Transnational Identities: Integrating Comics and Translation in Italian Language Pedagogy with Zerocalcare and Takuoa Ben Mohamed” and “The Disappointment of Heritage Tourism: Italian American Encounters with Sicily in The White Lotus.”

Before joining Penn, she taught at Coastal Carolina University and Franklin & Marshall College, where she received several grants to incorporate digital humanities practices into language and literature courses. In collaboration with students and librarians, she developed digital narrative maps based on Italian novels and created mapping projects on Venice and Naples that merge literary and cinematic representations of those cities. Her article “Mapping Italian Narratives with StoryMap JS” presents these projects and examines the value of combining close and distant reading to interpret both texts as maps and maps as texts.