I am a historical sociolinguist. At UWA, I am Chair of Modern European Languages and senior lecturer in Italian Studies. I am a former Acting Deputy Head for the School of Humanities. I have specific interests in language change in the history of standard Italian and Gallo-Italian varieties; historical multilingualism in the Italian peninsula; language/dialect contact and language ideology in the Early Modern Period. Much of the material I work with makes use of unpublished and unconventional archival manuscripts to deal with questions of linguistic variation in the past.

My first book looked at early evidence for tuscanisation in non-literary texts sent from Milan in the late fourteenth century. A second, co-authored book, provided a study of the nearly 200 extant letters held in the New Norcia Archive and written in Italian by a priest in colonial Western Australia (with Emeritus Professor John J. Kinder). A third volume has recently been issued by Brepols, entitled Languages and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in Renaissance Italy (co-edited with Dr Alessandra Petrocchi, University of Oxford). Most recently, with Professor Anita Auer (U Lausanne), I have edited a special issue of Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics on the role of merchants in language standardisation. I am currently preparing a fifth volume, on issues of the early circulation of language and supralocalisation in Renaissance Milan for De Gruyter [contracted].

After completing my PhD (2011) in history of the Italian language, I was Cassamarca Assistant Professor in Italian at The University of Western Australia before taking up a postdoctoral fellowship at Romanska och klassiska institutionen, Stockholm University. I then moved to Australian National University for several years as Convenor of Italian Studies, before returning to Perth. At UWA I teach Italian language acquisition at all levels of the curriculum, as well as specialist courses on the history of the Italian language and the Divine Comedy, with an emphasis on digital methods. 

I am part of the UWA research group for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, UWA research lab Frontier Technologies and Society, and UWA Space Centre (Emotions in Space research node). I am a current affiliate member of ANU’s Centre for Early Modern Studies, research associate of the former ANU Centre for Digital Humanities Research, and a former affiliate of the ARC’s Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. I am the former stream leader for historical sociolinguistics at ANU’s Centre for Research on Language Change. I am part of the editorial board for the journal La lingua italiana: storia strutture testi published by Fabrizio Serra, Rome, and an elected fellow of the Associazione per la storia della lingua italiana. Currently I am treasurer on the national committee for the Languages & Cultures Network for Australian Universities. In 2025-26 I will be Australian European University Institute Fellow, and I will be based at the EUI in early 2026.

You can hear more about me and my research here, here and here.