Claudio Di Felice is a University Lecturer at the Centre for Linguistics. He is a historian of Italian, and for this, his research interests span from Sociolinguistics to Philology dealing with historical facts and their documents. He also has twenty-five years of experience teaching Italian as a second language inside and outside the university.

More information about Claudio Di Felice

Fields of interest

• Historical sociolinguistics of Italian
• Italian philology
• Learning and teaching Italian as L2

Research

Part of my research focuses on Renaissance grammatical codification and in general on those texts produced within the intellectual debate on the vernacular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On this topic I published the linguistic writings of Alessandro Citolini in 2003 and collaborated on the edition of Giovanni Filoteo Achillini's Annotationi (2005). My doctoral thesis (supervised by Antonio Sorella and Giulio Lepschy) is dedicated to the printing process of Annibal Caro's Apologia (2006). I am in fact fascinated by the variants of the same edition copies, which are studied by the Textual Bibliography, and on which I have published some articles and supervised some bachelor's theses.

After teaching at the universities of Macerata, Siena, Tallinn and Reykjavik, in 2009 I was awarded with a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship to work at Leiden on sources of ancient Abruzzese, my dialect. The outcome was AnTeA, a digital archive of images and searchable transcriptions. I had previously published the last of Ernesto Giammarco's dictionaries, the Lessico Italiano-Abruzzese (2008). I also did some research on Italian minority languages, such as the Molise's Croatian of Montemitro, the Arberesh of Villa Badessa and the Walser of Issime.

I am currently developing a digitization project of Ernesto Giammarco's Lessico Etimologico Abruzzese, financed by the Italian Ministry of Culture on behalf of the Ernesto Giammarco Foundation, and publishing on sixteenth-century grammarians and treatise writers on Italian vernaculars.

In recent years I had some educational innovation projects funded with the aim of introducing online language tandems as a new learning method into the Italian bachelor's programme at Leiden. The latest project was financed by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science within the programme Virtual International Collaboration in Higher Education.

Grants and awards

• 2009-2011,  Marie Curie Action: Intra-European Fellowships for Career Development, project "Documenting Old Abruzzese". 
• 2012, “Immigrati IN-formazione e sicurezza”, project funded by the Italian Ministry of Works.
• 2020-2023, teaching projects funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (action: Sostegno cattedre lingua italiana), 2 summer schools, 2 BA courses.
• 2021, project Connecting with natives. LUCL grant, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University.
• 2022, The teletandem project. Educational Innovation Grant (ECOle), Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University.
• 2023, The teletandem project. VIS funds (Virtual International Collaboration in Higher Education), Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport. 
• 2023, Digitalization of Ernesto Giammarco's dictionaries DAM and LEA. Fondazione Ernesto Giammarco. Progetto funded by the Italian Ministry of Education (PNRR, M1C3 - investimento 3.3)

Curriculum vitae

Key publications

• 2024, Di Felice C., L'"italiano” nella prima corrispondenza diplomatica tra Impero turco e la Repubblica delle Sette Province Unite (1610-1614). In: Fresu R., Maninchedda P., Murgia G., Serra P. (eds.),  Il «traffico delle lingue». Idiomi a contatto in Sardegna e nel Mediterraneo in età preunitaria. Cagliari: UNICApress. 365-390.
• 2020, Di Felice C. (ed.), Nuovi aspetti linguistici e letterari dell’italianità. Berna – Berlino, ecc.: Peter Lang.
• 2019, Di Felice C., Hendrix H, Bossier P. (eds.), The concept of beauty in Italian literature and language. Leiden – New York, ecc.: BRILL.
• 2017, Di Felice C., Odelli E., Sorce R. (eds.), Insegnamento, tecnologia e migrazione. In: Incontri. Rivista Europea di Studi Italiani 31(2).
• 2016, Di Felice C. & Di Crescenzo T., Testamento di Silvestro Pantaleoni (1342). In: De Robertis, T., Regnicoli L., Zamponi S. (a cura di) Codice diplomatico dantesco. Nuova edizione commentata delle opere di Dante. Roma: Salerno. 464-471. 

Publications