Mike Giazzoni

Advisor

MA (English), Duquesne University

BS (Physics), Penn State University

Office
3506 Cathedral of Learning

Phone
412-624-0121

Fax
412-624-6885

As an advisor in the University Honors College (UHC), Mike Giazzoni works with students both in the Schools of Engineering and Arts and Sciences.

At UHC, Giazzoni works with the preceptors, the group of engineering students who run the honors sections of Pitt’s freshman engineering seminar; in this capacity, he also coordinates the Fessenden Honors in Engineering Program Certificate. Giazzoni also runs the reading group known as Pizza and Plays and coordinates UHC’s ambassador program.

Giazzoni is the advisor for Pitt’s Tennis Club and Circle K chapter. In the past he has taught sections of HONORS 0001 Freshman Seminar, HONORS 0021 Seminar in the Humanities, and various upper-class Chancellor Scholar seminars.

Giazzoni is working on a PhD in education at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is studying cross-disciplinary interactions in interdisciplinary communities—how people in one academic discourse community come to (or don’t) understand the members of another academic discourse community. This issue is hardly new; in late antiquity the liberal arts were divided into the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). However, the issue was revived in recent history by C.P. Snow’s lectures on what he called the “two cultures” as well as by cross-disciplinary events such as the Sokal hoax of 1996. How different academic cultures interact is more than an issue for esoteric study—the issue goes to the heart of how a liberal education can occur.

Giazzoni’s other academic interests include narratology, hermeneutics, and Renaissance drama.

Outside of work, Giazzoni enjoys jogging, attending the theater, and working on his house in Pittsburgh’s North Hills, where he lives with his wife, Ann, and his son, Michael.