Joseph (Giuseppe) Pace Asciak graduated B.A.(Hons) in Italian in 1975 with a pilot project dissertation, under the guidance of Prof. Joseph M. Brincat. After winning a scholarship offered by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he obtained a doctorate at the Università degli Studi di Firenze in 1979 with a thesis on Pirandello, under the tutorship of Prof. Giuliano Innamorati. Following an eight-year period of work as Office Manager with a leading group of companies of pharmaceutical and cosmetic products, he started teaching Italian at St. Aloysius College in 1987, at Secondary and Sixth Form level. He also taught at the Società Dante Alighieri and was the Secretary of its local committee between 1995 and 2002. Since 1989, Prof. Pace Asciak has lectured at the University of Malta in nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian literature, literary criticism, Italian morphology and syntax and Dante. He has also supervised various BA, MA and PhD theses. He served as Head of Department of Italian between 2007 and 2010. Since 1994 he has regularly held summer courses for international students, at the Accademia Lingua Italiana Assisi, in Italian language, culture and literature. This ongoing collaboration includes seminars for teachers of Italian and the publication of textbooks based on research and contact with different linguistic and cultural realities. He has collaborated with the Executive Agency Education Audiovisual Culture of Brussels, as an independent and suitably qualified evaluator in the field of Culture in relation to the EU Culture Programme. Professor Pace Asciak has held refresher courses for teachers and lecturers of Italian, presented papers in conferences and lectured in various countries: Italy, Argentina, Hungary, Moldova, France, Ecuador, Brazil, India, Sweden, Germany and South Korea. Between 2002 and 2010, he served as a member of the Broadcasting Authority, appointed by the President of Malta. From 1998 to 1999 he was Chairman of the Commonwealth Scholarships and Fellowships Board Malta. The President of the Republic of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, conferred on him two awards: Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana in 2009 and Commendatore Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 2010.
Teaching Italian through literature
Nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian literature
Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana, conferred by the President of the Republic of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, on 13 January 2009
Commendatore Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, conferred by the President of the Republic of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, on 25 June 2010
COLLABORATIONS
Accademia Lingua Italiana Assisi
Bibliografia Generale della Lingua e della Letteratura Italiana, Rome
Executive Agency Education Audiovisual Culture, The EU Culture Programme, Brussels
MEMBERSHIPS
Associazione degli Italianisti
Società italiana per lo studio della modernità letteraria
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages
