Laura Tommaso (PhD) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Molise (Italy). Her areas of research encompass media discourse, multimodality, cross-cultural rhetoric, and language by and about older persons.
During her stay at IICM, she will complete her book, Of and About Aging: Discourse, Language, and Culture, which presents detailed case studies illustrating the ways in which aging is constructed and communicated in contemporary American public and corporate discourse.
At the same time, she also plans to conduct semi-structured interviews with older female rock music fans to gain insight into female audience’ relationship with rock music from the late sixties and seventies.The collected oral histories will be analyzed through a narrative discourse analysis approach which will help to listen more closely to the details of narrating, focusing on specific narrative devices, grammatical devices and lexical specificities rather than on the general historical context. The work responds to two primary objectives: investigating the constitution, representation and negotiation of identities among aging female fans, and showing in what ways linguistics constitutes a privileged locus for the study of oral histories.
Apart from academic pursuits, Dr. Tommaso tries to make time for a number of other interests, including yoga and concert-going.
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