Qualifications

• Ph.D.: Italian Studies (New York University, 2015)
• M.A.: Italian Studies (New York University, 2010)
• B.A.: Western Society and Culture: Liberal Arts College (Concordia University, Montreal, 2008)
• Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA)
• Fellow of the Warwick International Higher Education Academy (WIHEA)

About

I joined the School for Cross-faculty Studies in September 2017. I joined Warwick in 2015 as Research Fellow in Italian Studies on the project Aristotelianism in the Italian Vernacular, funded by the European Research Council. I have taught all levels of Italian language and culture from the middle ages to present day, along with classical Greco-Roman epic poetry, medieval and renaissance French literature, early modern English epic, and renaissance Latin. I have also designed an introductory course to the Digital Humanities.

I have been passionate about interdisciplinary Liberal Arts education since my undergraduate degree at the Liberal Arts College of Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, where I was born and raised. During the course of this degree, I developed an interest in early modern Spanish and Italian literatures. In 2008, I moved to New York where I studied Italian at New York University, obtaining my M.A. in 2010 and my Ph.D. in 2015 with a dissertation project on changing definitions of heroism in sixteenth-century Latin and vernacular Christian epics written in Italy.

My research focusses primarily on early modern Italian literature (Jacopo Sannazaro and Torquato Tasso), philosophy, and poetic theory. I also work on Dante and medieval philosophy, book history, the intersections of Spanish and Italian early modern literary cultures (Cervantes) and the visual reception of renaissance art in the early twentieth century.

In 2020, I published an edited collection of essays on new perspectives in the study of early modern poetics—The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond—which emerges from a conference and graduate workshop that I organized at the Newberry Library in March 2017. I am a member of the editorial board of Poetics before Modernity and a series editor for Sources in Early Poetics (Brill). I am also a co-organiser of the multi-year Processing the PandemicLink opens in a new window series—a collaboration between the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at Warwick, the Newberry Library's D'Arcy McNickle Centre for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, and the Newberry's Center for Renaissance Studies.

Teaching and research interests

• Italian renaissance epic (Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Marinella)
• Christian epic
• Early modern poetics
• Literary criticism
• Counter-Reformation culture
• History of emotions and affect theory
• Intersections of Early Modern literary cultures in Southern Europe (Spain and Italy)
• Dante and medieval philosophy
• Transhistorical approaches to sustainability
• Early modern reception of Dante and Petrarch (in Italy, France, England, and Spain)
• Digital humanities
• Tourism studies
• Translation studies (particularly early modern English translations of Italian works)
• Language and literature pedagogy
• Problem-based learning
• Transviciniar learning

Selected publications

Edited collections

• Editor, The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond: New Directions in Criticism. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. (paperback reprint 2021)

Peer-reviewed articles and chapters

• —, and Anne Boemler, 'Tears in Heaven: Tracing the Contours of a Pan-European Transconfessional Genre,' Humanities 11.1 (2022): 4.
• ‘‘Defying Gravity:' Prose Epic and Heroic Style in Lucrezia Marinella's 1602 Vita di Maria Vergine,' Classical Receptions Journal 13.1 (2021): 107-125.Link opens in a new window
• ‘I Write Sins, Not Tragedies: Manuscript Translations of Hamartia in Late Sixteenth-Century Italy,’ in Acquisition Through Translation: The Rise of European Vernaculars, edited by Alessandra Petrina, 55-72. Turnhout, Brepols: 2020.Link opens in a new window

• ‘Soul to Squeeze: Castelvetro and Early Modern Emotional History’ in The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond, edited by Bryan Brazeau, 201-226. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
• ‘Building a Mystery: Giorgio De Chirico and Italian Renaissance Painting,’ The Italianist
  39.1 (2019): 20-43.Link opens in a new window
• ‘My Own Worst Enemy: Translating Hamartia in Sixteenth-Century Italy,’ Renaissance and Reformation 41.4 (2018): 9-42.Link opens in a new window
• ‘London Calling: John Harington’s Exegetical Domestication of Ariosto in Late Sixteenth- Century England,’ History of European Ideas 42.5 (Reading Publics in Renaissance Europe, 2016): 640-650.
• 'Emotional Rescue: Heroic Chastity and Devotional Practice in Iacopo Sannazaro’s De partu Virginis,' California Italian Studies 5(1) (The Sacred in Italian Culture, 2015): 225-246.
• 'Who Wants to Live Forever? Overcoming Poetic Immortality in Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme conquistata,' MLN 129, No.1 (Italian Issue, 2014): 42-61.
• 'I fight auctoritas, auctoritas always wins: Siger of Brabant, Paradiso X and Dante’s Textual Authority,' in Dante and Heterodoxy: The Temptation of Radical Thought in the 13th century, ed. by Maria Luisa Ardizzone (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014), 106-125.

In press

• 'From Ruins to Barricades: Venetian Materials and Onsite Learning to Sustain the Serenissima' (under review)
• 'Highway to Heaven? Dissimulating Christian Leadership in Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata' (accepted, under review)

• ‘Take Me Down to the Paradise City: An Ecological Approach to Paradise Spaces in Renaissance Epic’ (under review).

Working Papers

• Internationalisation of the Curriculum: Insights and Reflections.
  (Co-Lead Author; Internal Document Produced by the WIHEA Internationalisation Learning Circle currently being revised for publication)

Online publications and podcasts

• 'Schools of Athens: Liberal Arts and Global Challenges', GLOBUS (Feb. 2018)
• Vernacular Aristotelianism in the Renaissance Database 2.0 (Legacy migration)
• Warwick Centre for the Study of the Renaissance Podcast
• Aristotle in the Italian Vernacular, Project Website and Podcast
• Aristotele e Venezia, Exhibition Website

• Guide to Medieval and Early Modern Research in Italian Studies

Fellowships, awards, and grants

Teaching fellowships

• July 2020 — Liberal Arts Digital Bridging Materials For Rising Second-Year Students. Warwick International Higher Education Academy (WIHEA) Project Grant.
• June 2020 — with Rebecca Stone, Student Perceptions of Digital Assessment in the Faculty of Arts. Warwick International Higher Education Academy (WIHEA) Project Grant.
• January-May 2019—A Sustainable Serenissima: Water, Fire, and the Future of Venice. Warwick Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL) Strategic Project Grant.

Research fellowships

• September 2019—Warwick-Newberry Early Career Fellowship
  For research at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
• August 2016—Warwick-Newberry Transatlantic Fellowship
  For research at the Newberry Library in Chicago
• June 2016—Warwick Humanities Research Centre Summer Fellowship
  For archival research in Florence and Milan, Italy
• June 2015—FRQSC* Postdoctoral Research Startup Grant
  _{*Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Société et la Culture} 

Event-related fellowships

• June 2022– Warwick Humanities Research Centre; Funding to organize 'Processing the Pandemic III: Hope' symposium (April 2023)
• September 2016—Warwick Humanities Research Fund; The Bibliographic Society
  Funding to organize ‘Contexts of Early Modern Literary Criticism’ symposium (March 2017).

Editorial and Review Activity

• I am a series editor responsible for Italian Renaissance submissions as part of the Brill series, Sources in Early Poetics.
• I am a member of the Editorial Board of Italian Studies.

I have served as a reviewer for the following journals/presses:

• Italian Culture
• Italian Studies
• The Italianist
• Philological Quarterly
• Renaissance Quarterly
• Bristol University Press

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External Examining / Promotion Review

I am currently the external examiner for Durham University's Liberal Arts Programmes.

I have served as a Higher Education Expert / external promotions reviewer for LSE's Education Career Track.