Angela Zagarella is the Italian Language Program Coordinator and teaches beginning, intermediate, advanced language, literature, culture and cinema courses. She has taught both in Portland and at the University for Foreigners in Siena, Italy. She has reviewed articles, textbooks worked with publishing companies and written scripts for videos. She has been a language consultant for local theatrical productions and has taught classes for singers at the Portland Opera, travelers and business people.
Her approach to language teaching is interactive and personalized and her classes are taught primarily with an immersion-style approach. Her areas of interests are language teaching pedagogy, Italian cinema, Italian culture and civilization, contemporary Italian literature and Mediterranean Studies. Her current research focuses on literature of migration and national identity in Italian and Italophone literature. In particular she compares the actual experience of migration of Italophone writers from other Mediterranean countries to the experience of migration of Italian writers who moved from Southern to Northern Italy in the postwar years.
Angela Zagarella is very engaged in academic outreach to maintain the Italian program strong and vibrant. She regularly presents at academic conferences, her students have been the recipients of various scholarships and have received internships in the Portland office of the Italian Vice Consul. Watch a student testimonial of how studying Italian at PSU has impacted their lives.For more information about Angela's innovative approach to language teaching:
When she is not in the classroom teaching, Angela is actively promoting Italian culture to the Portland community. She is one of the original board members of the Associazione Culturale Italiana di Portland. In 2014 in partnership with the Associazione she organized the first Italian Film Festival held at the PSU 5th Avenue Cinema. Angela is currently on the board of the Associazione Culturale Italiana di Portland, the Italian Business Club Foundation, has been the co-executive director of the Portland Bologna Sister City Association and is the President of the Oregon chapter of Sicilia Mondo, which promotes Sicilian culture and tradition all over the world.
Angela has given presentations on a variety of Italian topics such as Boccaccio and Manzoni, multiculturalism, migration, history and cultural heritage in contemporary Italian cinema, She has presented at the Scuola Italiana, The Tuscan Association, The Lake Oswego library and recently online.
Her hobbies are cooking and making sourdough bread. The Magna Graecia pasta, blending her Sicilian and Greek heritage, is her signature dish.