Elena's research and teaching focuses on Italian cinema, and her recent work explores the environmental impacts of the film industry, as well as how films imagine and shape environments.  

She is the author of Methods of Murder: Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction(2012), which traces Italian epistemologies of crime in contemporary crime fiction.
 Her most recent monograph, Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human, investigates contemporary Italian cinema and its relationship with locations of filming. It won the Howard R. Marraro prize from the Modern Language Association. 

With Deborah Amberson (University of Florida), she co-edited Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), about the roles of nonhuman animals in the Italian literary, cinematic and philosophical traditions. A companion volume about Italian plants and vegetal philosophies will be published in Brill’s Critical Plant Studies series in 2027. With colleagues Serenella Iovino (University of North Carolina) and Enrico Cesaretti (University of Virginia), she co-edited Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies (University of Virgina Press, 2018). With Marco Armiero and Roberta Biasillo, she co-directs a new editorial series in the Environmental Humanities with EditPress, an independent publisher based in Florence. 

Currently, Elena is working on a book on the historic Ferrania film factory, an iconic producer of filmstock for the industry located in Liguria. Her work investigates the environmental history of the factory and the many ways celluloid “lives” beyond its eclipse in the digital era.