Professor Sara Garau elected to the Swiss Maturity Commission for the 2025-2028 period

On Tuesday, 14 May 2025, the Federal Council appointed twelve members of the Swiss Maturity Commission (CSM) for the first time, a joint commission consisting of experts from the Confederation and the cantons. Together with the appointment of members by the EDK on 21 October 2024, the CSM is now fully constituted for the next four years. Prof. Sara Garau, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society at USI and Vice-Director of the Institute of Italian Studies (ISI), was also appointed among the elected members.

The Swiss Maturity Commission (CSM) acts as a joint recognition body for the Confederation and the cantons and deals at the national level with issues relating to maturité and its recognition. It consists of a maximum of 25 members, one-half appointed by the Federal Council and the other half by the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education (EDK). In addition, these two bodies jointly nominate the president of the CSM. Starting in 2025, Kathrin Hunziker (AG) succeeded Hans Ambühl (LU), who has held this position since 2017. The CSM is responsible for establishing the procedures for the national recognition of maturité certificates that are recognised by the cantons. Additionally, it organises the centralised Swiss maturité examinations and supplementary examinations, which serve as gateways for access to universities and universities of teacher education following vocational or specialised maturité programmes.

According to the new administrative agreement between the Federal Council and the EDK on cooperation in the field of maturité (SR 413.18), the appointment of the CSM is now the responsibility of the Federal Council, which also assesses its tasks. The CSM is empowered to issue directives to improve equal opportunities in secondary school education and to set minimum requirements for multilingual secondary school programmes. The administrative agreement is part of the total revision of the legal foundations and the teaching framework programme, which came into force on 1 August 2024. The members of the CSM appointed by the Federal Council come mainly from the university sector, while those appointed by the EDK come from secondary education. EDK has already appointed its twelve members on 21 October 2024.

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Sara Garau is Associate Professor at the Institute of Italian Studies (ISI), where she teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and methodology courses in the Bachelor's and Master's programmes in Italian language, literature and civilisation.

She studied in Basel, Bologna and Padua. She worked on Italian novels in the 19th century and devoted her studies to various aspects of narrative, translation, and cultural mediation in Italian literature between the 18th and 20th centuries. She collaborated on the commentary of C.E. Gadda's Pasticciaccio (Carocci, 2015) and is part of the team for the National Edition of the Opere di I. Nievo (Marsilio). Recent publications include the collective volumes edited by her, Migrazioni letterarie nel Settecento italiano: dal movimento alla stabilità (Peter Lang, 2020) and Co-creare. Forms of literary and inter-artistic collaboration (with G. Cordibella, Versants, 70/2, 2023).

For years, she coordinated the Confederation's Doctoral School in Italian Civilisation (Swiss Universities programme) for ISI, in collaboration with ISA. From 2017 to 2020, she served as Vice-dean and Study Delegate at the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society.

She is co-editor of "Versants. Swiss Review of Romance Literatures" and a member of the Committee of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW).