About
Dr. Lauren Surovi is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Italian and coordinator of the Italian language program in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. She specializes in the Italian Renaissance and has taught a variety of courses on Italian language, literature, and culture to both undergraduate and adult learners, and also has extensive experience working with incarcerated students and developing curriculum and programming for college in prison initiatives. Surovi is an active member of several professional associations in Italian and Renaissance Studies and has organized conference panels on Italian theater and teaching literature in the prison classroom. She has also published a number of book reviews, which can be found in journals such as Italica, Forum Italicum, and Quaderni d’italianistica.
Dr. Surovi’s teaching focuses on emphasizing the value of foreign language training in a comprehensive, multicultural education that reflects the needs of a diverse student body. Her work promotes a communicative, multiliteracy approach in the classroom and she encourages a welcoming and positive environment that motivates students to move beyond their comfort zone to discover new perspectives through the study of Italian language, literature, and culture.
Dr. Surovi earned her PhD in Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MA in Italian Studies at Middlebury College. She specializes in Italian Renaissance literature and culture, with research and teaching interests that include early modern comedy, the intersection between theatre and politics, and understandings of sex and gender in early modern culture. She is particularly interested in the ways in which theatre afforded opportunities to interrogate social and cultural norms in sixteenth-century Italy, and her current project investigates the motifs of honor, shame, and shamelessness in the representation of social transgressions in Italian Renaissance comedy. She is also a Syracuse alum and thrilled to have returned to the Italian program in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics as a faculty member.
In addition to her research on the Italian Renaissance, Dr. Surovi is also interested in more public-facing efforts to promote the value and importance of the Humanities. During her graduate studies, she served two terms as a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow (2019-2020; 2020-2021) at the Center for the Humanities at UW-Madison. During her first year as a Public Humanities Fellow, Surovi worked on an initiative with Madison College involving students’ perceptions of opportunities for educational advancement, particularly as it relates to the College’s Liberal Arts Transfer Program. In her second term, Surovi served as a fellow for the UW-Madison Odyssey Project, working with their program for higher education in prison, Odyssey Beyond Bars (OBB), which offers credit-bearing UW-Madison courses to students incarcerated in Wisconsin state prisons. Following the Public Humanities fellowship, she began a full-time position as Academic Program Manager for OBB. In spring 2022, Odyssey Beyond Bars expanded its program to offer credit-bearing courses in four different prisons across Wisconsin with the aim of developing further initiatives that increase access to higher education for incarcerated students. Read a recent article in the Chronicle for Higher Education that features Odyssey Beyond Bars. While not currently active in prison-based education, Dr. Surovi maintains her commitment to promoting higher education to incarcerated students and reducing barriers to access for students of all backgrounds.