Chiara De Santi

Chiara De Santi (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Modern Languages at Farmingdale State College (FSC), where she teaches courses in Italian language, culture, and cinema, and international cinema, in face-to-face, synchronous, hybrid, and online modalities. Before joining FSC in the fall of 2017, she taught for several years at the State University of New York at Fredonia as a Lecturer in the World Languages and Cultures Department, beyond serving as a teaching faculty in Visual Arts and New Media, Communication, and English. 

At FSC, she is the advisor of the Global and Cultural Awareness Microcredential and the COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) Coordinator after having chaired the COIL Task-Force in 2021-2022; her COIL collaborations have been with Italy, Japan, Mexico, and South Africa. She designed the Global Learning: COIL Microcredential that has been offered since the spring of 2024. She previously served as the Italian Language Coordinator and the Advisor of the Minor in Italian Studies.

She is a representative for the states of New York and New Jersey in the Modern Languages Association (MLA) Delegate Assembly (2023-2026). Previously, she served a three year term as a New York State representative in the American Association of Teachers of Italian (AATI) Executive Committee (2021-2023).

Her research interests, fueled by her academic life and curiosity, include pedagogy, Italian as a second language, Italian cinema, literature, and history, and Russian language and history. She has published on a variety of topics. Her scholarly contributions have appeared in Cinema e Storia, The Journal of Language Teaching and Technology, Teaching Italian Language and Culture Annual (TILCA), Mosaic, Cultura e Comunicazione, L'Anello che non tiene, Digital Georgetown, Griselda Online, Insula Europea, Faculty Research Network, and Slavia.

Her PhD dissertation from the European University Institute was published as Strategies of Sovietization in Central Asia (Köln: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009). She co-edited a volume on Passato e presente nel cinema italiano. Storia e società sul grande schermo [Past and Present in the Italian Cinema: History and Society on the Silver Screen] (Manziana: Vecchiarelli Editore, 2022), and co-authored a textbook of Italian in two volumes, DiversITALY: Elementary Italian with Inclusive Language & Gender Equality (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing): Volume 1 (2022) and Volume 2 (2023). Her monograph on Italian intellectuals traveling to the USSR in the 1950s was published in 2023 by Casa Editrice Le Lettere, Florence, as Privet, compagne e compagni! Intellettuali in Unione Sovietica negli anni Cinquanta [Privet, Comrades! Intellectuals in the Soviet Union in the 1950s]. She is currently focusing on the representation of Italian emigration in film and on Italian emigration to South America.