SPEAKERS
- Stefano U. Baldassarri
International Studies Institute, Florence- David Cast
History of Art, Bryn Mawr College- Julia H. Gaisser
Bryn Mawr College (Professor Emeritus)- Victoria Kirkham
University of Pennsylvania, Emeritus- David Marsh
Rutgers University- Eric Pumroy
Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College- Roberta Ricci
Italian Studies, Bryn Mawr College- David Rundle
University of Essex, UK- William Stenhouse
Yeshiva University- Nancy Struever
Johns Hopkins University- Nancy Vickers
President Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr College- Massimo Zaggia
University of BergamoPARTICIPANTS’ PROFILES
Stefano U. Baldassarri (Director, International Studies Institute, Florence) holds a Ph.D. from Yale University. His main field of study is medieval and Renaissance literature. He has done critical editions of works by Leonardo Bruni, Antonio Loschi, Giannozzo Manetti, and Coluccio Salutati.
David Cast (Ph.D History of Art, Columbia) is Professor of History of Art and Eugenia Chase Guild Professor of the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College. He works on the history of the Classical Tradition, most specifically in the Italian Renaissance. His most recent publications are The Delight of Art: Vasari and the Traditions of Humanist Discourse (2009) and The Ashgate Companion to Giorgio Vasari (2014).
Julia Gaisser is Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Bryn Mawr College. She is principally interested in Latin Poetry, Renaissance humanism, and the reception and transmission of classical texts. Her books include Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (1993), The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass (2008), and Catullus (2009); she is also the editor and translator Pierio Valeriano on the Ill Fornune of Learned Men (1999) and Giovanni Pontano’s Dialogues: Charon and Antonius (2012).
Victoria Kirkham is Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written on medieval and Renaissance Italian culture, both literary and visual. She contributed the essay on Quattrocento literature, “Poetic Ideals of Love and Beauty,” to Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s “Ginevra de’ Benci” and Renaissance Portraits of Women,” catalog of an exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington (2001); and “Hypno What? A Dreamer’s Vision and the Reader’s Nightmare, ” to Architectures of the Text: An Inquiry into the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, in Word and Image (2015). Among other recent articles are “Contrapasso: The Long Wait to Inferno 28,” in MLN (2012); “The Cook’s Decameron, or, Boccaccio to the Rescue of the Dull British Diet,” in Boccaccio in America (2012); “The Apocryphal Boccaccio,” in Mediaevalia (2013); and “The Decameron in Arcadia,” on an eighteenth-century Sienese manuscript anthology at Penn, in Studi sul Boccaccio (2013). Her latest volume, co-edited with Janet Smarr and Michael Sherberg, is Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (Chicago, 2013).
David Marsh (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Harvard) is Professor of Italian at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Quattrocento Dialogue (1980), Lucian and the Latins(1998), Studies on Alberti and Petrarch (2012), and The Experience of Exile Described by Italian Writers (2013); as well as the translator of Alberti’s Dinner Pieces (1987), Vico’sNew Science (1999), Petrarch’s Invectives (2003), and Renaissance Fables (2004).
Eric Pumroy is Associate Chief Information Officer and Seymour Adelman Director of Special Collections at Bryn Mawr College. Prior to coming to Bryn Mawr in 1999, he was director of the museum and library at the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia, and was head of special collections at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. He holds graduate degrees in Early Modern European History and Library and Information Science from the University of Chicago, and has written and spoken extensively on libraries, historical collections, and ethnic studies.
Roberta Ricci received her Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Johns Hopkins University, MD, after a Laurea in Lettere Moderne summa cum laude from the University of Pisa in Philology. She is now working as co-editor for a special interdisciplinary issue of NeMLA Italian Studies 2016 dedicated to the Renaissance, to which she will also contribute with an article on Poggio Bracciolini. She has authored “Scrittura, riscrittura, autoesegesi: voci autoriali intorno all’epica in volgare. Boccaccio, Tasso”, Pisa, ETS Press, and co-edited “Approaches to Teaching the Works of Primo Levi Levi”, New York, MLA Press.
David Rundle is Lecturer in History and Co-Director of the Centre for Bibliographical History at the University of Essex. He is also a member of the History Faculty of the University of Oxford. David is an historian of the intellectual life of Renaissance Europe and is particularly interested in the evidence for the circulation of ideas provided by surviving manuscripts and early printed books. His is completing a monograph to be published by Cambridge University Press entitled The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain: the English Quattrocento. He is author, with Prof. Ralph Hanna, of the forthcoming Descriptive Catalogue of the Western Manuscripts, up to c. 1600, of Christ Church, Oxford (Oxford Bibliographical Society). He is also, with Hester Schadee, preparing a translation of some of Poggio Braccolini’s works for the I Tatti Renaissance Library.
William Stenhouse is an Associate Professor of History at Yeshiva University, New York. He works on the renaissance reception of classical antiquities. His books include Reading Inscriptions and Writing Ancient History: Historical Scholarship in the Late Renaissance (2005), and the volume of drawings of inscriptions in the catalogue raisonné of the dal Pozzo Paper Museum (2002).
Nancy J. Vickers is both President Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr College. She previously taught at Dartmouth College and the University of Southern California. Her interests range from Dante to Renaissance poetry to the transformations of the lyric genre as a result of changing technologies. She has published numerous articles and was a coeditor of Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. She recently served as president of the Dante Society of America and is currently treasurer of the board of the American Council of Learned Societies.
Massimo Zaggia (Ph.D. in Italian Philology, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa) is an Associate Professor of Italian Philology and Linguistic at the Università di Bergamo. His research focuses on Italian Literature and Civilization in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, particularly in Lombardy, in Tuscany, in Sicily. He has published the critical edition of Folengo’s Macaronee minori (1987) and of the Tuscan volgarizzamento from Ovid’s Heroides (2009-2015), the biography Giovanni Matteo Bottigella. Un percorso nella cultura lombarda di metà Quattrocento (1998), three volumes Tra Mantova e la Sicilia nel Cinquecento (2003), and a large number of articles.