Faculty Profile

Laura Chiesa headshot.

Laura Chiesa

Associate Professor of Italian
Romance Languages and Literatures
lchiesa@buffalo.edu

Education:

  • PhD, Comparative Literature, UCLA, 2005

Professional experience:

  • Associate Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Italian Studies, UB

What mentoring means to me:

Mentoring is one of the fundamental forms of generosity promoting the prosperity of life in the academic community; mentoring takes its shape from listening, talking, sharing, encouraging, and upholding each individual desire and challenge. Mentoring consists in supporting students’ aspirations and goals. In academia, many different circumstances can momentarily create difficulty, doubt and incomprehension, hence mentoring implies helping students to find their own paths on which to orient themselves and advance, amid the complexity of academic life. 

Topics I am willing to discuss with students:

Academic Culture

  • Considering a non-academic path after grad school.
  • Dealing with politics and conflict with faculty or peers.
  • Decoding and demystifying academic culture and norms.
  • Uncertainty about staying in grad school.

Personal Experiences

  • Caregiving for other loved ones.
  • Experiences related to being a woman.
  • Experiences related to class and/or socioeconomic status.
  • Experiences related to physical health and/or abilities.
  • Experiences related to racial, ethnic, cultural and/or religious minority status.
  • Experiences related to sexual and/or gender minority status.
  • Financial stress and strain.
  • Non-U.S. citizen or immigrant experiences.