Laurea, Sapienza University of Rome, 2002
Ph.D., Florida Atlantic University, 2007
Silvia Giagnoni is a writer, freelance journalist, activist, and media scholar.
She earned a master’s degree in mass communications from Sapienza University of Rome, while she worked as a journalist at Filmmaker’s Magazine. In the summer of 2003, she moved to the United States to pursue her PhD at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, to study Italian American cinema and culture under the supervision of Professor Anthony Tamburri. While in the U.S., she became fascinated with Christian rock and ended up shifting her research focus, writing her dissertation on the phenomenon, as well as producing and codirecting a documentary film on the topic titled Take it Back? Evangelical Christianity and Popular Music.
In Florida, Professor 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, Professor 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 movement, 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 explored immigration in Alabama in the years of state-level policy activism on the issue. In 2017, she published Here We May Rest. Alabama Immigrants in the Age of HB 56 (NewSouth Books).
In 2018, she moved back to Italy to raise her children and to teach in American colleges and study abroad programs. During the pandemic, she was actively supporting the reopening of schools and demanding more funding for public schools with Priorità alla Scuola.
Since moving back, Professor Giagnoni has published two novels, Fioca (Iacobelli, 2021) and Alabama Hunt (AlterEgo Edizioni 2024). She is also the author of GKN. Cronistoria Personale di un Innamoramento Collettivo (Panerose Editore, 2024), an account of the ongoing struggle of ex-Gkn workers to keep their jobs and re-industrialize the site of Campi Bizenzio (Florence), as well as the social movement that was born around their motto “Insorgiamo” (Let’s rise up!).
