A native of Emilia-Romagna, Italy, Federico Pacchioni graduated from the "Istituto Magistrale Immacolata" in Cesena in 1998 and completed his undergraduate studies at La Sapienza in Rome and Prescott College, Arizona, pursuing a unique academic path focused on the development of a humanistic, cross-cultural, and experiential pedagogy. Dr. Pacchioni’s early interests in education went hand-in-hand with his studies in literature and film, eventually leading to his Ph.D. in Italian Studies from Indiana University Bloomington in 2010. After holding posts at the University of Connecticut-Storrs and the Italian Immersion School of Middlebury College in Vermont, he won, in 2012, the Sebastian Paul and Marybelle Musco Endowed Chair in Italian Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California.
At Chapman University, he teaches interdisciplinary courses in Italian Studies, the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, and the University Honors Program, including several travel courses across the Italian peninsula. From 2012 to 2023, he directed the Italian Studies program, expanding curricular offerings and programming and facilitating the establishment of new endowments dedicated to the study of Italian language and culture. These developments led to the Ferrucci Institute for Italian Experience and Research, of which he became the Founding Director in 2023, the same year he was made Full Professor.
He is the author of 60+ publications, including scores of peer-reviewed articles and eight books. Among his scholarly volumes, Inspiring Fellini: Literary Collaborations behind the Scenes (University of Toronto Press, 2014) provided the first systematic analysis of Fellini’s cinema as the product of a participatory creative process examining the director’s relationships with influential writers like Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tonino Guerra, and Dino Buzzati. With The Image of the Puppet in Italian Theater, Literature and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), he revealed the deeper cultural associations and transmedia aesthetic potentials of Italy’s puppetry traditions intersecting a variety of artistic fields and new archival findings. He is also the co-author of the mainstay textbook of Italian film studies in the Anglo-American world, A History of Italian Cinema (2nd edition), first conceived by his mentor, the late Peter Bondanella.
Dr. Pacchioni’s scholarly work is rooted in the creative process itself, especially poetic practice, and his creative writings have been published by journals and presses in Italy and North America. Among these are the poetry collections La paura dell’amore (Raffaelli Editore, 2014) and I frutti del mio giardino (Manni Editore, 2022), and a work of lyrical travel prose Southwest of Italy: Stanzas for a Travel Memoir (Guernica World Editions, 2022).
Courses Taught at Chapman: