About Olivia Albiero

Email:

albiero@sfsu.edu

Phone:

Title: 

Assistant Professor

College of Liberal and Creative Arts

Office Hours: 

Monday: 11:00 am-12:00 pm
Wednesday: 2:00 pm-3:00 pm

Office Hours (Additional Info): 

Fall 2019: If you need to make an appointment outside of my regular office hours, please send me a message to schedule a time/day that works for both of us (albiero@sfsu.edu)

 

At SF State Since:

2016

Bio:

Since 2016, I have been an Assistant Professor of Italian and German at San Francisco State University, where I teach a wide range of language, literature, and culture courses in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. I am also the Program Coordinator and Undergraduate Advisor of the Italian Program. I strongly believe in the value of the humanities and the possibilities that foreign languages and cultures offer in leading to creative and critical encounters among individuals and groups. I am convinced that anyone can learn a foreign language if driven by motivation and provided with the adequate tools and support. I am excited to guide students in their exploration of Italian and German and I look forward to welcoming new students in my courses.

Research

My primary research focuses on storytelling in contemporary German-language literature, which I explore through the lens of narratology. I am particularly interested in the narrative representation of “moments of rupture,” which often ensue from crucial experiences of physical and metaphorical mobility or lack thereof. I also research the way comics and graphic novels portray individual and collective stories, in particular related to issues of mobility, migration and the (re)definition of identity. I also enjoy exploring how contemporary German literature and culture expand to encompass multimodal projects and what writing in the digital age means. My work has been published or is forthcoming in Colloquia Germanica, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, DIEGESIS, and Pacific Coast Philology.

About me

I grew up in Italy, where I received a Laurea Triennale (B.A.) in Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures (German, English, and Spanish) and a Laurea Specialistica (M.A.) in Modern Euro-American Languages, Literatures and Cultures (German and English). In 2009 I moved to Seattle, where I completed an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Germanics at the University of Washington. I also spent time at the Universität Wien (Vienna) and the Humboldt Universität Berlin, and I taught Italian in two Austrian high-schools. In my free time, I enjoy baking, running and hiking.