I am a third-year PhD candidate at Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. My doctoral project "Rural Modernities: the Politics and Aesthetics of Extra-Urban Experiences in Italian Cinema" investigates the configurations of Italian modernity in rural films from the postwar period to the 21st-century. Drawing upon an emerging interdisciplinary field of research that intends to reassess non-urban portrayals across diverse media, each chapter investigates aspects related to rural modernity by proposing and weaving unexplored relations between historical and contemporary cinema. By reading against the grain key neorealist, post-neorealist, and twenty-first-century films, I propose my own theorization of Italian rural modernity and how the cinematographic language exposes critical relationships between rural and urban spaces, identities, and their ongoing crises. My research project is supervised by Professor Stephen Gundle and Professor Karl Schoonover and funded by the Wolfson Foundation.