I'm a first-generation PhD and a linguist with a pretty long passion for understanding how language works. I was born in Craiova, a city in the south-west of Romania, where I spent the first 18 years of my life. I remember that as a student in school I found myself attracted to linguistics, how language functions, how it changes, and how people use it every day.
When I was a teenager, I started learning Italian on my own. Every summer, while spending holidays in the countryside (somewhere in centre of the Oltenia region), I would visit the only library available in the village. It was there that I borrowed every Italian textbook and dictionary I could find. I began creating my own textbook for self-study, written entirely by hand (I had nice handwriting back then), in a large hardback notebook with many slightly yellowish pages. I used a fountain pen filled with teal ink (my favourite ink colour) to copy grammar rules and vocabulary lists, work through the exercises, and write my own explanations. I used to do this almost every day, from morning until evening, reading, writing, repeating, etc. My family was a bit perplexed, to say the least, because while most teenagers (including my sister and cousins) were outside enjoying their summer holidays, I was inside with a pile of textbooks, drawing verb conjugation tables.
Since I had never been to Italy at that time, I would watch Italian TV programs to hear spoken Italian and get used to the sounds and prosody of the language. I would also listen to Italian songs (however improbable the selection might have been), borrow DVDs of Italian films or catch them on the Italian TV channels I could access (basically only the RAI ones). Many of the films I watched back then, such as La leggenda del pianista sull'oceano (The Legend of 1900), Liberi (Break Free), I cento passi (One Hundred Steps), Che ne sarà di noi (What Will Happen to Us), La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth), Romanzo criminale (Criminal Novel), and Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother is an Only Child), had a quite strong effect on me. At the time, they opened up a world I had only read about in books. They showed me ways of speaking that felt completely new to me, but also quite "close". Years later, I had the chance to meet a couple of people involved in some of those films and speak with them, something that, as a teenager sitting in a Romanian countryside house with a borrowed DVD and a notebook full of grammar notes, would have seemed surreal. Unlike the Italian music I was listening to back then (which I wouldn't go out of my way to revisit), those films have remained important to me.
As a teenager, I was also a huge fan of Italian football, especially Juventus. I followed every match in TV and, of course, I knew the players by heart... After moving to Italy, I had the chance to see Juventus play live at the stadium several times. Nowadays, I don't really care about football anymore, but every time I remember how passionate I used to be, it makes me smile (and cringe, just a little).
I know for sure that these early experiences shaped my decision to study languages (English and Italian) and linguistics at the University of Bucharest. I spent two years in Bucharest before going on an Erasmus exchange at the University of Padova in Italy during my third year of undergraduate studies. I returned to Bucharest to complete my Bachelor's degree, graduating with a thesis on Italian syntax, focusing on interrogative clauses (a topic that now I prefer to observe from a safe distance).
Determined to continue in the field of linguistics, I moved back to Italy, first on a scholarship at the University for Foreigners of Perugia, and then for a Master's degree in linguistics at the University of Bologna. There, I discovered two areas that have really fascinated me ever since: Phonetics and Computational Linguistics. I later pursued both of these during my PhD at the University of Pisa.
After completing my PhD, I worked at the University of Bologna and later at the University of Pavia, where I coordinated the Experimental Phonetics Laboratory. During my time in Pavia, I was also affiliated with Almo Collegio Borromeo, which, at a personal level, turned out to be one of the most beautiful parts of my stay in Lombardy.
I am currently based in Rome, where I work as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in linguistics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. As a teenager, Rome represented an imagined destination for me, distant but magnetic. Now, working here and sharing my passion for linguistics with my students feels quietly fulfilling and exactly where I want to be.
When I'm not working, you'll probably find me hanging out with my two pink-bellied short-necked turtles, Mac and Speedy, Emydura subglobosa by species, but more like tiny (well, actually not that tiny) shelled roommates with big personalities. They keep me and my husband busy and entertained, and they definitely rule our house in their own quiet way.
I also love cooking, and if I hadn't followed a career in linguistics, I probably would have opened a restaurant somewhere. People say I'm quite good at it. I mostly cook Italian dishes, but every now and then I go back to Romanian recipes, especially the ones I learned from my mother.