Giovanna Faleschini Lerner is an Associate Professor of Italian at Franklin & Marshall College, where she teaches courses in Italian cinema and modern Italian literature. She received her laurea in Modern Languages (Russian and English) from the Catholic University of Milan and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Lerner's research interests include representations of history in film and literature, inter-art criticism, women's writing, and the literature and cinema of migration. Her first book, Carlo Levi's Visual Poetics: The Painter as Writer, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012. She has also published articles and book chapters on Italian cinema and twentieth-century Italian literature and critical theory. In 2011-2012, Professor Lerner was the recipient of a Mellon regional fellowship at the Penn Humanities Forum. She is currently at work on a book-length manuscript on the Italian cinema of migration.