Maria Tagarelli De Monte, PhD, is an adjunct professor of General Linguistics for the University of Pisa, and adjunct professor of Italian Sign Language (LIS) for Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma (UNINT, since 2015). She is a research fellow in sign language and deaf education at the University of Udine. Former researcher and project manager for the State Institute for the Deaf in Rome (Istituto Statale per Sordi di Roma – ISSR), where she also served as co-referent for the Research and Project Department from 2014 to 2022, with the supervision of Prof. Ivano Spano. While at ISSR, she designed and managed several European projects, mainly in the Erasmus+/Leonardo da Vinci programmes. In 2020, she served as an expert for the European Commission.
She occasionally collaborates in organising/teaching seminars and workshops for Master’s and PhD students of Italian and foreign universities, on the topics of her interest. She also designed the Master in “Sign Language for Accessibility and Inclusion” launched at UNINT (Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma) in 2023. She’s the author of the first Italian translation of “Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American deaf”, published in 2021 by Franco Cesati, with an extended introduction of Davide Astori. In 2015, she co-edited the first publication proposing an adaptation of LIS courses to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).
She holds a PhD in Linguistics, from the Third University of Rome (Università di Roma Tre, in 2015) and a degree in Communication Sciences, from the University of Siena, with a major in Cognitive Science and Interaction Design (2007). Before heading to research in sign linguistics, she served as a research fellow for the National Research Council, Institute of Applied Physics (IFAC-CNR), for 12 months from October 2008. Her role at IFAC-CNR was to collaborate to the completion of the ICT-ONE project, specifically in the design of a fully accessible interface for collaborative online platforms.
During her research and management career, she covered topics such as bilingual bimodalism in the Italian and foreign deaf and CEFR-related educational methodologies for sign language. Her interests are in multilingualism, linguistic variation, metaphors and metonymy in the creation of new lexicons, language attitudes and affordances in language and learning. She also has a strong background in human-computer interaction design (IxD) and universal design, specifically for online and blended educational and collaborative platforms; the design of educational materials for the deaf and the use of technology in education.