Maria Luisa Gozzi

Maria Luisa Gozzi received her Laurea at the University of Florence with a specialization in Germanic philology, she wrote her thesis on the Italian translations of "Beowulf." She earned her Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Rutgers University with a dissertation on Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Futurism. She also holds an M.A. in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution from Columbia University.

Maria Luisa Gozzi has taught in the Department of Italian at Columbia University since 1993, where she has created new language courses and contributed to periodic innovations in the curriculum. She has taught all the language courses offered by the department.

Her research interests are second language acquisition, philosophy of language, linguistics, oral narrative, Italian cinema, opera and ethnic music, translation practices, the uses of multimedia technology in learning and teaching, and intercultural communication.

She seeks in her work to incorporate all aspects of Italian culture in the framework of language acquisition, from opera and contemporary music to cinema, literature, poetry and social media.

She has been awarded grants from the Consortium of Language Teaching and Learning, and developed Internet-based materials for language classes on several different topics, including early Venetian and Neapolitan music, regional dialects, hybrid texts, Grammelot, Italian theatre and cinema, and the Italian perspective on the Holocaust.  

She combines an extensive knowledge of the formation and mechanics of her native language with the belief that learning a foreign language represents not simply the acquisition of a new linguistic system but the expansion of the student's capacity to communicate. The time spent reflecting on another culture and its ways of expressing itself can help to create a more empathetic society, more oriented toward ethical choices, and more capable of managing and resolving social conflicts. 

Through her teaching she seeks to introduce students to new ways of looking at their world and at the world at large, to forge transnational skills, and to develop the cultural intelligence that help us to become competent citizens of a global world.