Patrizia La Trecchia

Associate Professor of Italian

I am a cultural studies scholar and have been working at the intersection of food studies and the environmental humanities for most of my career. My research draws from political ecology, decolonial theory, feminist studies, urban studies, visual culture, communication, and sociology addressing food justice, food sovereignty, and environmental justice within the larger social concerns of a globalized world in a transnational perspective.

I am privileged to share my Italian roots serving the Italian Studies program at the University of South Florida, a program that I brought into existence with all its current course offerings and singlehandedly direct since 2004. I also launched and direct the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the University of South Florida under the auspices of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture and the Environment. I have established international partnerships between the Environmental Humanities Initiative at USF and the Narratives & Social Changes International Research Group, the Observatory on International Cooperation for Sustainable Development, and the interdisciplinary Research Group Margini/Margins. Spazi, potere, canone/ Spaces, Power, Canon. I have been teaching the first course in the Environmental Humanities at the University of South Florida for several years. The course is usually offered in the fall semester and is ideally followed by ITT4531 Italian Food in Film, a course on the visual politics of food offered in the spring semester that is one of the very first courses selected to be Global Citizen certified.
 
I am the author of two textbooks Italian Film Study: Il Postino (2009) and Italian Film Study: Mid-August Lunch (2013) as well as the monograph Uno sguardo a Sud. Vent’anni di movimenti, storie, conflitti e trasformazioni nella città di Napoli (2013) that was the first study to analyze the city of Naples in a postcolonial and transnational perspective.  My monograph, The Politics of Food Justice in Italy: Decolonizing Approaches to Food is forthcoming with Routledge. A second monograph, Reframing Souths: Naples in Global Perspective, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. My publications have appeared among others in Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Studies in European Cinema, Mondi Migranti, Italica, Italian Americana, Cinemasessanta.

I have adopted a food-focused pedagogy since the beginning of my career as a forerunner of the discipline of food studies at the University of South Florida. I have been teaching food studies courses and politics of food for the past fifteen years (In the Kitchen, Patrizia la Trecchia: A Passion for Food). I value kitchen work as political practice of food justice and essential element of a sustainable food system. Until before the Covid pandemic, I was purchasing groceries and cooking for and with my students in the demonstration kitchen of the Diabetes Center at the Morsani College of Medicine.

I serve on the jury of Cinemambiente, the environmental film festival that founded the Green Film Network, the association of the world’s major environmental film festivals. I have been serving as jury and advisory board of the Gasparilla International Film Festival since its inception. In 2014 I was Visiting Scholar at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. I also served as member of the Habitat Partner University Initiative Hub on Food Security and as supporter of the Milan Protocol. I was selected to deliver a TEDx talk on Food Waste in February 2013.