Humanities & DH in the Classroom

• My teaching philosophy subscribes to the ideas of Carl Rogers, who views education as an expression of humanism and everyday practice, and considers education as acts of creativity. The humanistic paradigm is a call I embrace as a scholar and community member interested in knowledge production and sharing

• I take action by drawing from pedagogical methods such as Culturally Responsive Teaching, integrating insights that a multicultural and multilingual classroom represents the diverse society we live in.

Dr. Agostini taught at Princeton University, Rutgers University and Rutgers Honors College, the Rutgers Digital Humanities Initiative and Lab, the New Jersey Digital Humanities Consortium, the New York City Digital Humanities Week, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Wake Forest University.

Rutgers University, NJ

Digital Humanities Graduate Research Specialist, Digital Humanities Initiative and Lab, New Brunswick Libraries: instructor, consultant, blog author, podcast founder, and coordinator of a special interest IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) discussion group, 2020-2021

Part Time Lecturer, Department of Italian. Teaching Italian 101 online, Fall 2020

Teaching Assistant, Department of Italian, 2017 to 2019. Classes taught: Elementary Italian associated to Italian Food Culture, Elementary Italian online, Advanced Conversation through Cinema, Italian Composition and Stylistics, A Cultural Tour of Italy, and Intermediate Italian

Research Assistant, 2017 to present: Italian Food Culture, Introducing Italy City by City: Venice and Its Culture, Introduction to Italian Literature I and II, Walking in the Metropolis add-on language unit, and Studies in Italian Literature of the Fourteenth Century: Petrarca (graduate level)

Princeton University, NJ

Lecturer, Department of French and Italian, 2020-2021. Classes taught: Italian 102 (online) and three precepts of Contemporary Italian Civilization: The Literature of Gastronomy (in person and online)

Rutgers Honors College, NJ

Research projects coordinator in humanities and digital humanities, 2019-2020

Graduate Mentor Fellow, organizing a field trip at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, writing workshops, and individual consultations on projects, 2018-2019

North Carolina State University, NC

Visiting Lecturer at the Department of History. Classes taught: two sections of History of Ancient and Medieval Science. I coordinated Honors theses, guided tours at the North Carolina Museum of Art exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester and the Creative Mind,” and digital humanities projects at the Hill Library Visualization Studio, 2015

University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC

Visiting Professor at the Department of Languages and Culture Studies and at the Department of History. Classes taught: Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced Italian; Italian Culture; Greek History, 2014-2015

Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC

Visiting Professor, teaching Elementary and Intermediate Italian classes, 2013

Take a peek at my previous courses and what I have coming up for the future!

Digital Humanities Workshops

What did you like most about the Palladio workshop?

"The walk-through of the different features while being able to consult the notes in the pdf file. I also thought the use of your own experience as contextualization for why and how to use Palladio was very helpful."

"PDF and instructor's screen-sharing while she used the tool - I need this level of how-to hand holding!"

"Really great framing of the tool. I appreciated Caterina's frankness about what the tool [Palladio] can do and what it can't do."

"At some point, not to give you more work, but I think it would be exciting to see a presentation of your own work and your use of tools/digital methods for it."

"This was really great. I also appreciated Caterina's attention to Zoom fatigue and pacing."

“The NYCDH Week workshop I had the pleasure of attending was the introductory course to mapping with Palladio – a mapping tool developed at Stanford which aims to analyze relationships across time… I’d never even heard of Palladio until I checked out the description for the workshop… our instructor Caterina Agostini was such an expert on the tool and really made the workshop an enjoyable experience.” (From a blog post by L. V. on my NYCDH workshop)

What is your biggest takeaway from the IIIF workshop?

"I now understand what IIIF is, how to use tools that leverage IIIF, and I know where to go to learn more about it."

"Specific use cases of IIIF. I learned why it is important rather than simply a tool."

"I was very interested by the research uses of the IIIF, as I'd mostly thought of it in terms of presentation."

"The patience and detail of the explanation [...] examples [...] interactivity."

"You are a great workshop leader! It was great! I loved it! Your work is amazing!"

"Caterina Agostini was a very engaging presenter and I liked the interactive elements of the workshop."

World Language Classes

"This course has strengthened my knowledge of not only the language but also the culture of Italy. This course and the instructor has helped motivate me to continue learning and practicing Italian."

"Caterina engaged the class with as much authentic Italian info as she could with videos and audio lessons, and was very involved in making sure the students were understanding the material we were learning."

"Agostini encouraged my growth by making the class so easy to follow. I have learned so much (...) I will definitely try to choose Professor Agostini again for Italian 2."

"She understands if you have any family emergency, she lets you make up assignments and will work with you on certain assignments if you need extra help. She is really nice and polite."

"Caterina worked with me with computer issues I was having when I was not able to hand in assignments on time and for that I am thankful (...) She made sure everyone understood what was going on and especially made clear where assignments were."

Content Classes and Small Discussion Groups

"Awesome, super knowledgeable and engaging, genuinely connected with all of us."

"Lovely and engaging and thoughtful and attentive. She made this course great for me."

"She was great. If anyone takes this course, have her as your preceptor. Super sweet and it was so fun."

"Caterina Agostini is a wonderful preceptor. She is very good at helping students better-understand the readings and material. Please do yourself a favor and request her as your preceptor!"

"I loved precept. It was the highlight of my week. I found that we had interesting and stimulating discussions while also keeping it light to keep everyone engaged. I am definitely going to miss this precept."

DH:

• Data and the Humanities

• Digital Communication for the Humanities

• Digital Media Studies in GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums)

The Global, the Local, and the Cultural:

• Medieval Padua Painted City is my pedagogical project illustrating 14th-century fresco cycles included in the UNESCO World Heritage List (2021) in Padua, Italy. Take a look at my course website presenting medieval art and geospatial data in local and global medieval studies and cultural heritage

I presented this project at the 2022 International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo MI, in a panel sponsored by TEAMS, Teaching Association for Medieval Studies, and Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages & Renaissance

• From a Distance, with Love, on maps and travels discussing interactions between people in Italy and Africa, Asia, and the Americas, through printed books and maps at the libraries, while developing class projects and learning from the DECIMA project

• A Grand, Visual Tour of Italy, integrating physical and digital cultural objects related to the historic tradition of traveling to Italy. This class explores digital mapping tools such as Palladio, CARTO, and ArcGIS. The final project is a DH project with maps from online collections and local university collections

• Visual Venice: At the Movies and on Stage

• Venice and the Renaissance (in Italian and in English)

Material Book History:

• Humanistic Paleography and Codicology (in Italian and in English)

• Early Modern Printing (in Italian and in English)

• Early Modern Scientific Illustrations (in Italian and in English)

• In and Out of the Canon: Digital Editions, advanced graduate class based on a digital edition project, with students working collaboratively on transcriptions, critical studies, and translations of Renaissance and early modern books in the Italian vernacular with some references to the tradition of Latin academic texts. We would analyze digital images as carriers of texts and illustrations through IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) and IIIF viewers to display, edit, annotate, and share images on the web. Writing and sharing digital editions is an important step to philological insights and cultural understandings of texts both belonging to the literary canon, and defying it

History of Science and Medical Humanities:

• Global Science, 1300-1700

• The Literature of Science, from Dante to modern times. In English. The history of science perspective has the potential to attract students from STEM

• Galileo Galilei. In Italian and in English. 3 credits in English, plus one additional credit in Italian.