Letizia Modena is Associate Professor of Italian at Vanderbilt University. Traveling and living abroad have instilled in her a keen desire to explore collective spaces, place-making, belonging, and dislocation. Her research and teaching center on the interplay of the humanities and the city, exploring how the narrative viewpoint in written and visual fictions of the city can endow us with alternative ways of seeing, describing, and constructing urban space. In Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis (Routledge, 2011, 2014), she focused on the urbanistic roots of the bestselling novel Invisible Cities (1972), a perennial favorite of architects and city planners. Her current book project, “Peripheral Visions,” is a sustained reflection on how representations of the city in imaginative literature, photography, and film can renew urban planning and at the same time deepen our individual and collective relationships to the built environment.