Information for:
Laurea, Sapienza University of Rome, 2002
Ph.D., Florida Atlantic University, 2007
Silvia Giagnoni is a writer, freelance journalist, activist, and media scholar who lives in Prato. She worked as a film journalist while pursuing her degree at Sapienza University of Rome, before moving to London to improve her English and explore the city and its possibilities.
In the summer of 2003, she was accepted into the doctoral program at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, where she moved as she intended to study Italian American cinema and culture under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Tamburri. While in the U.S., she became fascinated with Christian rock and ended up shifting her research focus and writing her dissertation on the phenomenon. She also wrote and produced a documentary film on the topic (Take it Back? Evangelical Christianity and Popular Music).
In Florida, Prof. Giagnoni also became an advocate for farmworkers' rights upon “discovering” Immokalee, the labor-pool community that became the subject of her narrative non-fiction account, Fields of Resistance. The Struggle of Florida’s Farmworkers for Justice (Haymarket Books 2001).
In 2008, Prof. Giagnoni was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Theatre at Auburn University Montgomery. She spent ten years in the birthplace of the civil rights movements, strengthening her ties with the local activist community and deepening her commitment to social justice issues. While at AUM, she reached the rank of associate professor and finished her investigation on immigration in Alabama in the years of state-level policy activism on the issue, Here we May Rest. Alabama Immigrants in the Age of HB 56 (NewSouth Books 2017).
In 2018, she moved back to Italy to raise her children, and she has been teaching in American colleges and study abroad programs since. During the pandemic, she has been active in supporting the reopening of schools and demanding more funding for public schools with Priorità alla Scuola.
Prof. Giagnoni just published her first novel, Fioca (Trans. Feeble) (Iacobelli, 2021). She is currently working on a book on the struggle of GKN workers to keep their jobs and the social movement that has grown around them. She plans on finishing her new novel (set in Alabama) in the coming months.
