Lina Insana is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches Holocaust literature, the literature of the ventennio nero, Sicilian writers, Italian detective fiction, translation studies, Italian American studies, and migration and identity in the Italian context. After receiving a BA and an MA in Italian Language and Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, she completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000, with a dissertation on the practice and metaphor of translation in Primo Levi's Holocaust writings. Her research has focused primarily on representations of the Shoah, with particular emphasis on the intersection of Holocaust and translation studies. Her book-length study of Primo Levi and translation, Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony, forthcoming from the U of Toronto Press, was the recipient of the 2007 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Manuscript in Italian Studies (awarded by the MLA). She has recently begun work on a new project that will explore the role of Sicily in shaping notions of italianita for the modern Italian state. In addition to her research on Levi, Insana has published on Italian American children's literature, women's literature in Fascist culture, Boccaccio's defense of literature, and myth in Beppe Fenoglio.