Dickinson Faculty Awards Professor of Italian and Film Studies Highest Teaching Honor
Professor of Italian and Film Studies Nicoletta Marini Maio (right) with Italian students on the last day of their senior seminar. Submitted.
The Dickinson Award for Distinguished Teaching
by Craig Layne
Dickinson’s faculty recently recognized Professor of Italian and Film Studies Nicoletta Marini Maio with the Dickinson Award for Distinguished Teaching. Determined each year by a faculty vote and approved by the president, it is the college’s highest teaching honor.
“Receiving this award is deeply moving to me, and my first thought goes to the students and to the colleagues who nominated me,” said Marini Maio. “To be recognized by people whose intellectual generosity and rigor I admire so much is humbling in the best sense of the word.”
Marini Maio is the founding editor of the international open-access, peer-reviewed journal gender/sexuality/italy. Her main fields of research are film studies and Italian cinema, particularly the intersections between politics, gender, cultural representations, popular culture, the narrative mode and collective memory. She is the author of A Very Seductive Body Politic: Silvio Berlusconi in Cinema. She has published extensively on Italian contemporary film and television, focusing especially on terrorism in film, auteur cinema and girlhood in Italian TV series. Thanks to her interest in popular culture, she has also published on the "Decamerotici," a series of movies inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio's masterpiece of early Italian literature, The Decameron, and Winx Club, an international comic strip and video series for young girls created in Italy, which is also very well known in the U.S. Finally, she has edited a critical translation of Italian playwright Marco Baliani’s Body of State and two books on research-based methods on teaching Italian and foreign languages through theatre. Marini Maio previously served as the vice president of the American Association for Italian Studies and is currently presiding on the Film Studies Caucus for the same organization.
Marini Maio said teaching has been a practice of “intellectual and human transformation,” and she has been grounded in the Italian feminist concept of partire da sé (starting from oneself), the idea that we think and learn from within a web of relationships and lived experiences. “In Italian language and culture classes, I have watched students discover that learning a language is never only a technical exercise, but an entry point into a different way of organizing reality, a different set of assumptions about history, culture and social life,” she explained.
“Teaching [for Marini Maio] has never been restricted to scheduled class time alone but instead extends into mentorship, community building and the creation of meaningful human connections that continue far beyond the semester itself,” Provost & Dean of the College Renée Cramer said as she announced Marini Maio’s award during the academic year’s final faculty meeting, where colleagues also celebrated Marini Maio’s impending retirement. Cramer highlighted Marini Maio’s “unwavering devotion to Dickinson students.”
In addition to her teaching and research, Marini Maio also served as the director of Dickinson’s distinctive Mosaics, interdisciplinary semester-long research programs designed around fieldwork and immersion in global communities.
“There are things that cannot be learned in a classroom, things that only happen when you are standing somewhere unfamiliar, listening to voices and stories that do not confirm what you already believe,” said Marini Maio. “Some of the most meaningful moments of my career have been watching students in those contexts: the moment when a fixed frame cracks open, when they realize that the world is larger and stranger and richer than they had assumed, and that this is not frightening but liberating.” She also explained that she draws on Italian novelist Elena Ferrante's notion of "becoming," the animating hope that students leave more convinced of their own capacity for self-transformation—on their own terms, wherever life takes them.
“I am profoundly grateful to Dickinson, which has given me the space to teach, to research, to take risks, and to belong to a community of scholars and human beings whose curiosity, generosity and genuine love for what they do have made me, over the years, a better thinker, a better teacher and a better person,” she said. “To receive this recognition at the end of a career I have loved, from colleagues I deeply admire, feels like the most generous possible closing gift.”
Marini Maio earned a bachelor’s degree at Italy’s University of Perugia. She earned master’s degrees from the University of Rome and University of Pennsylvania, and she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in Italian cinema. At Penn, she met her beloved advisor Millicent Marcus, now at Yale University, and a group of fellow graduate students that still call each other fanciulle (girls, in ancient Italian).
The Dickinson Award for Distinguished Teaching is supported by a permanent endowment funded by gifts from senior administrators.
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Published June 11, 2026