Laura Di Bianco is an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Johns Hopkins University whose research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Italian studies, film studies, women’s and gender studies, and environmental humanities.
Laura was born and raised around Rome, earning a laurea in Philosophy and Literature at Roma Tre. She did her graduate studies in New York, earning her PhD in Comparative Literature with an Italian Specialization from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 2015.
In 2020, she was awarded the Lauro De Bosis Fellowship at Harvard University, supporting her research on Italian cinema and ecology; in the same year, she was the recipient of the Bogliasco Fellowship in the Humanities.
Her first book project Wandering Women. Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking, (Forthcoming 2022, Indiana University Press) investigates the work of contemporary Italian women directors from a feminist and ecocritical perspectives.
At Johns Hopkins, Laura teaches classes of Italian cinema, modern and contemporary Italian literature and ecocriticism, and she is the co-editor of the academic journal MLN (Modern Language Notes).
Prior to entering American academia, she worked for several years as producer, researcher and curator at the Centro sperimentale di cinematografia, Italy’s national film school.
