Catherine Freddo is a Ph.D. candidate in German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. She is based in the Italian section, where she focuses on the intellectual history of early modern Europe. Her dissertation, entitled “Vox Populi: Vernacular politics in early modern Italy”, explores the correlation between civic identity and vernacular language in the Italian literary tradition. Over the past several years, she has collaborated extensively with the Medicine, Science and the Humanities major and is currently teaching a cross-registered course entitled “Tortured Body, Tortured Soul: Pain in early modern Europe.” She is a recipient of the Dean’s Teaching Fellowship and was a finalist for the 2018 “Excellence in Teaching” award for graduate assistants. She is a graduate of Smith College and holds a M.A. in History of the Italian Language from Middlebury College, which she completed at the Università di Firenze in Florence, Italy. She is honored to be joining the Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine as a graduate fellow for the 2019-2020 academic year.