Italian Studies Professor Tailors Lessons to Her Country’s Stylish History
03/01/2025
By Ed Brennen
Growing up in Modena, Italy, a city known for its rich balsamic vinegar and Maserati and Ferrari sports cars, Giulia Po DeLisle remembers strolling past the storefronts of some of the world’s most luxurious Italian fashion houses: Armani, Gucci, Prada, Versace.
“I was surrounded by beauty and fashion,” says Po DeLisle, an associate professor of Italian studies in the College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences since 2010. “The fashion names were unattainable, but it’s there for you to see in the windows—to dream and to see yourself dressed in a certain way.”
In 2022, Po DeLisle received a small grant from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation to create new content for her Advanced Italian Grammar course, which promotes the country’s language and culture. Since that year was also the 70th anniversary of Italy’s first fashion show (held in the Sala Bianca at Palazzo Pitti in Florence in 1952), she tailored the syllabus to examine fashion and design, through Italian film and literature, from the postwar period to the 21st century.
“You may think grammar has nothing to do with fashion, but the way we teach languages, it’s really to connect and put the grammar in certain contexts,” she says. “Fashion is something that we always see, and I try to find ways to connect it in every level that we teach. I think the students enjoy it. Fashion speaks to them.”
Besides reading short stories by Clara Sereni and watching documentaries like Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Seven Reeds, One Suit” and Ottavio Rosati's “The Forbidden Fashion,” Po DeLisle’s students learn about contemporary topics such as women’s labor and sustainability.
“I try to find connections with society, and I think the students respond to that. They learn what is good and what is bad about this industry of fashion,” she says.
Fashion became an academic pursuit for Po DeLisle while she was getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature from City University of New York. Studying under renowned fashion scholar Eugenia Paulicelli, Po DeLisle helped translate a book that Paulicelli wrote on Rosa Genoni, who is considered Italy’s first lady of fashion.
Po DeLisle and Paulicelli have since organized conferences on fashion, film and sustainability in Rome and Bologna and recently curated a special issue on “Film, Fashion, Costume in Italy and Beyond,” for the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies.
“She opened up this world to me from a theoretical perspective,” Po DeLisle says of Paulicelli. “You see the world that is behind what you see in a window display or on a catwalk.”