I graduated at the University of Padova (Italy) in Classics, Italian and Modern Greek in 2000 and I have a Masters degree (2004) and PhD in Translation Studies (2009) from the University of Manchester.
During my studies I taught Italian language and culture at the University of Manchester, where I have completed a post-doctoral research project funded by Leverhulme in collaboration with Dr Ludovica Serratrice (The University of Manchester) and Professor Antonella Sorace (The University of Edinburgh). The research aimed to study online language comprehension in English-Italian and Spanish-Italian bilingual school-age children.
I was appointed at the University of Birmingham in September 2010 as a Teaching Fellow in Translation Studies.
In the last few years I have also been working as a freelance translator, translating from Modern Greek into Italian and from English into Italian.
My research has been so far the exploration of the ways in which narration/writing and translation are closely linked in migrant writing. More specifically, I looked at how code switching (language shifts) played a role in the construction of Italian-Canadian and Italian identity narratives, through translation/subtitling/dubbing into Italian of literary and audiovisual Italian-Canadian works. I intend to further elaborate on theories of narrative and translation in migrant writing in general (especially Italian migrant writing) that take into account translation as a main feature of narrative construction.
Another strand of research I am pursuing is the investigation of the narrative construction of queer in diasporic scenarios and the migration/translation of this concept into the Italian cultural sphere, a topic which has been un-researched in Translation Studies.
I am also interested in audiovisual translation.
Conferences and seminars
I regularly attend and speak at national and international conferences or workshops on translation studies, Italian studies and migration studies.
In 2008 I co-organised, at the University of Manchester, a 'Literary and Audiovisual Translation Discussion Group' (held once a month) and two conferences: 1) the first CTIS International Postgraduate Conference: 'Translation Frames: Gate keeping and Gateways' held in Manchester on the 30th June – 1st July 2008, and an interdisciplinary conference on the topic of 'identity formation' held at the University of Manchester on April the 4th 2007.
Other activities
I am a member of the CSIS (Canadian Society for Italian Studies) and I attend regularly conferences organised by the association.
I am a member of GAP unit, a non profit organisation based inManchesterspecialised in gender awareness, for which I work occasionally as a translator.
I am a member of IATIS (International association of Translation and Intercultural Studies) and of the ITI WMG (InstituteofTranslationand Interpreting-West Midlandsgroup).
Chapters in books
Baldo, Michela (2011) ‘Translation and Opposition in Italian-Canadian Writing’, in Asimakoulas and Rogers (eds) Translation and Opposition,Bristol: Multilingual Matters, chapter 9, 161-181.
Baldo, Michela (2009) ‘Subtitling Multilingual Films. The case of Lives of the Saints, an Italian-Canadian TV Screenplay’, in Federico Federici (ed.) Translating Voices for Audiovisuals, Roma: Aracne, chapter 5, 117-135.
Articles
Baldo, Michela ‘Lu Malocchio in Italian-Canadian writing and in Ricci’s trilogy’, under review and due to appear in the autumn 2011 special edition of Quaderni di Italianistica.
Gualardia Antonio and Michela Baldo (2010) ‘Bear or ‘orso’? Translating gay bear culture into Italian’, In Other Words 36 (2): 23-39.
Baldo, Michela (2010) ‘Dubbing Multilingual Films: La terra del ritorno and the Italian-Canadian Diaspora’, special edition of Intralinea.
Baldo, Michela (2008) ‘Queer in Italian-North American Women Writers’, GJSS (Graduate Journal of Sociological Sciences) special issue ‘Queer Studies: Methodological Approaches’, 5(2): 35-62.
Serratrice, L., Sorace, A., Filiaci, F. & Baldo, M. (2011) ‘Pronominal objects in English–Italian and Spanish–Italian bilingual children’ Applied Psycholinguistics, 1-27.
Serratrice, L., Sorace, A., Filiaci, F. & Baldo, M. (2009) ‘Bilingual Children's Sensitivity to Specificity and Genericity: Evidence from metalinguistic awareness’, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 11 (2): 239-257.
Sorace, A., Serratrice, L., Filiaci, F. & Baldo, M. (2009), ‘Discourse Conditions on Subject Pronoun Realization: Testing the linguistic intuitions of older bilingual children’, Lingua 119(3): 460-477.
Sorace, Antonella, Ludovica Serratrice, Francesca Filiaci and Michela Baldo (2007) ‘Plural Noun Phrases in Late Simultaneous Bilingualism: A study of English-Italian and Spanish-Italian children’ Proceedings of the 31st Boston University Conference on Language Development 1-12.