What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?
After graduating from Bowdoin in 2019, I completed a Watson Fellowship, traveling to Norway and New Zealand to explore how cultural values of family impact both criminal legal systems and personal conceptions of justice. I spent four months in Norway working in a reentry café and bike shop with incarcerated individuals and three months in New Zealand living with and learning from Māori restorative justice facilitators. After my fellowship, I attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 2023. I now work as a staff attorney at Northeast Legal Aid, providing free civil legal services to people with criminal records or those re-entering from incarceration.
Why Italian studies?
Having taken four years of Spanish in high school, I had no connection to Italy or plans to study Italian when I came to Bowdoin. I remember attending an academic fair and seeing how warm and welcoming the Italian professors and students were. When there wasn't room in the Spanish class I wanted, I thought, why not try Italian? I was drawn in by the genuine care from the professors, the small class sizes, and the strong sense of community within the program. After my first class, I never left.
I ended up studying abroad in Rome during my junior year and returned that summer through a Global Citizens Fellowship from the McKeen Center to work in an alternative incarceration center. The program housed incarcerated women with their children in the community rather than in prison, valuing familial connection over traditional notions of punishment. I knew I wanted to work with incarcerated individuals but faced age-related restrictions in the US. What I learned that summer inspired my Watson project and my advanced independent study with Professor Anna Rein, in which I compared the societal and legal treatment of incarcerated mothers in Italy and the United States.
To this day, I reflect on what I learned from the Italian Studies department at Bowdoin, my time in Rome, and the incarcerated mothers I had the privilege of working with. These experiences have been integral in shaping my path toward reentry legal services, a field I am deeply passionate about and find incredibly fulfilling.
