Sara Dallavalle

I am an Associate Instructional Professor in Italian at the University of Chicago, where I teach language and culture courses at all levels, coordinate the first-year sequence, manage the Italian Program’s website and social media presence, co-organize cultural events, mentor graduate student instructors, and oversee placement and diagnostic assessments.

I hold a master’s degree in Specialized Translation in English and Spanish (IULM University, Milan) and a Ph.D. in Italian Studies from Indiana University (2020), with a focus on Italian comics. My research brings together comics studies, translation studies, and foreign language pedagogy. I have published on Italian comics and publishing culture in venues such as Simultanea and the International Journal of Comic Art. My chapter, “Teaching Italian (with) Comics,” appears in Italian as a Foreign Language: Teaching and Acquisition in Higher Education (Vernon Press, 2023), where I analyze how comics support linguistic development and cultural interpretation in college classrooms. I guest edited a 2024 special issue of Italica devoted to new directions in Italian culture and language pedagogy. My article, “Pino Zac’s Orlando Furioso and the Art of Comics Adaptation,” is forthcoming in The Italianist. I am currently working on two forthcoming publications: an article on auteur comics magazines in Italy, to appear in a special issue of Quaderni di Italianistica (2027), and a chapter on translating Italian comics for an edited collection arising from the Mediating Italy Summer School (University of Bologna, 2019), to which I was invited as one of its inaugural participants.

My teaching develops from this intersection of pedagogy, translation, and visual culture. In the elementary sequence, I introduce grammar through sustained work with primary materials – images, short literary excerpts, film clips, music, and comics – so that students learn to analyze context as they build formal accuracy. In my advanced courses, students engage in project-based and multimedia work, develop their public voice in Italian, and explore contemporary social and cultural issues. 

In Spring 2026, I designed a new course on Italian comics and twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian history, in which students studied comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels in their historical contexts and examined print editions to understand the material and cultural conditions of their production and reception; the course culminated in a collaborative digital exhibit, curated through Omeka, in which each student designed and populated an individual room – selecting a theme, choosing sources, writing captions, and developing an interpretive argument, all in Italian. In Autumn 2025, my students completed a podcast project that required them to script, record, and revise their work, strengthening precision, clarity, and rhetorical control. In 2023, I developed a course on translating Italian comics in which students produced annotated translations and critical commentaries addressing register, the relationship between text and image, and audience experience

Alongside my teaching, I contribute to assessment design and curricular development. I designed and implemented the Advanced Proficiency Assessment in Italian with the University of Chicago Language Center. In 2025-2026, with colleagues Celia Bravo and Diana Palenzuela, I received a $7,000 University of Chicago Artificial Intelligence and Education Working Group seed grant to develop AI-supported placement testing tools for Spanish and Italian, with the goal of improving placement accuracy and aligning assessment practices more closely with classroom expectations.