Associate Professor, Italian Studies
- Ph.D., UCLA, Italian
- M.A., UCLA, Italian
- B.A., Claremont McKenna College, Foreign Languages (Spanish and Italian)
Brittany Asaro joined USD’s Department of Languages, Cultures, and Literatures in 2016. She teaches all levels of Italian language as well as courses on Italian literature and culture, both on campus and abroad. Dr. Asaro is affiliated faculty in USD’s Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program as well as the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She is an affiliate of the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and is a former president of the Renaissance Conference of Southern California.
Scholarly Work
Dr. Asaro is a specialist of medieval and Renaissance Italian literature with a focus on love motifs and theories, the representation of women, and the fourteenth-century writer Giovanni Boccaccio. Her articles have appeared in journals such as gender/sexuality/italy, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, and Modern Language Notes. She wrote the introduction to the anthology The San Diego Decameron Project: Stories from the Pandemic (Ink Spot Press 2021) and co-edited the volume Five Comedies by Carlo Goldoni (University of Toronto Press 2016). Her current book project considers the impact of reputation and public image on romantic relationships during the Italian Renaissance.
Areas of Interest
Dr. Asaro has been teaching Italian at the college level since 2008. She has a particular enthusiasm for teaching language, as she also learned beginning in Italian 101 as a first-year undergraduate. Dr. Asaro has designed literature and culture courses on a wide range of subjects, such as Italian Renaissance Foodways, Love and Desire in the Italian Renaissance, Italian Children’s Fantasy Novels, and Dante in the African American Imagination. She teaches regularly in the Learning Communities program and the Second Year Experience program in Florence.
Dr. Asaro has had the honor of serving as an interpreter at Comic-Con International San Diego and the Special Olympics, and has worked as a kitchen intern at artisanal chocolatier in Florence.