Anna De Fina obtained a Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere from Palermo University, an M.A. in Linguistics from Esculea Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico, a Master of Philosophy in Linguistics from Cambridge University (U.K.), and a Ph. D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University. Between 1981 and 1993, she worked as Professor of Applied Linguistics and Italian at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, where she chaired the Applied Linguistics Department between 1990 and 1993. In 1994, she moved to the United States where she taught at Georgetown University, University of Maryland, and Mary Washington College. In 2004 she joined the Georgetown Faculty as Assistant professor of Italian Language and Linguistics in the Italian Department.
Her interests focus on Language Contact, Bilingualism, Narrative, Language and Identity, Immigrant discourse. Her most recent publications include the book Identity in Narrative (2003, John Benjamins) the co-edited volumes Italiano e italiani fuori d'Italia (2003, Guerra), Dislocations, Relocations, Narratives of Displacement, co-edited with Mike Baynham (St. Jerome, 2005)and Discourse and Identity (2006, Cambridge University Press), cod-edited with D. Schiffrin and M. Bamberg). She has published numerous articles in internationally recognized journals and chapters in edited collections on a variety of topics in Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis, from attrition and code switching among Italian speakers abroad, to narratives in immigrant discourse, from the analysis of aspects of classroom discourse, to the use of pronouns in political discourse, to the linguistic construction of identity.