Elena Past joined the faculty at Wayne State University in 2006. She is currently Associate Dean of the Irvin D. Reid Honors College and Professor of Italian in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Elena teaches a wide range of courses in Italian literature, film, and culture on topics that include contemporary Italian literature and cinema, literary theory, crime fiction, ecocriticism and ecomedia studies, and posthumanism and animal studies. She has also taught the Introduction to Global Stories course for Wayne State’s Global Studies program and is currently teaching a new course on Climate, Environment, and Media.

Elena has frequently accompanied Wayne State University’s Study Abroad program, Wayne in Abruzzo, to Gagliano Aterno, Abruzzo in the summers, where she teaches a film course that links students’ experience on location in Italy with a study of film and the environment. In Detroit, she helps coordinate the annual Italian Film Festival and other cinematic and cultural events in the Metro Area. She currently serves as a member of the President’s Standing Committee on Environmental Initiatives.

In 2021-2022, Elena spent the year conducting research on a project about Ferrania film, thanks to a Rome Prize Fellowship in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome and a Fulbright fellowship.

With Danielle Hipkins and Monica Seger, from 2018-2023 Elena served as co-editor of The Italianist Film Issue, a once-a-year publication that features cutting-edge research in Italian screen studies. She’s a member of the Advisory Boards for Italian Culture, the Journal of Environmental Media and Lagoonscapes: The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities, and co-director with Marco Armiero and Roberta Biasillo of EditPress’ series in the Environmental Humanities.