Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Agata Nipitella is a fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of Italian Studies. Her work seeks to intervene in the way migration histories are traditionally narrated, shifting the focus away from archival dates and numbers toward the more elusive and often neglected, yet foundational, emotional landscapes of the migrant experience. By approaching affect as an epistemological category, she investigates how emotions — considered as historically rooted forces — guide the way individuals and communities relate to shifting ideas of home and belonging across generations. Her current research explores the possibilities of the digital humanities to account for these affective dimensions, specifically through the design of “affective digital archives” that treat voice and silence as meaningful data. Her teaching has spanned topics from Italian language to the cultural politics of the frontier and the construction of “Italianness.” Before arriving at Brown, where she earned an M.A. in Italian Studies, she completed an M.A. in Italian Language and Culture for Foreigners at the University of Bologna and a B.A. in Foreign Languages and Cultures at the University of Catania. Fluent in five languages, she approaches questions of identity through a deeply multilingual, transnational, and transcultural lens.