Graduate Program
The new PhD track in Italian Studies offered by the Romance Studies Department at Duke University is a recently established program designed for students interested in researching Italian literature and culture from a solid historical and theoretical perspective.
Our program takes advantage of five regular-rank professors of Italian from the Department of Romance Studies, and of the affiliated faculty in departments and programs such as Art History, Cultural Anthropology, English, Film/Video/Digital Studies, History, International Comparative Area Studies, Literature, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Religious Studies, Women’s Studies and Theater Studies. Flexible in design, a student's individual course of study is developed in close and regular consultation with members of the faculty in order to provide a meaningful curriculum that responds to a student's particular interests and strengths, while preparing the student in all the relevant and necessary fields of Italian Studies.
The Duke learning environment includes exceptional library and computer facilities in the humanities, including the Franklin Humanities Institute and the nearby National Humanities Center, which organize many events of relevance for scholars of Italian Studies. Perkins Library, one of the nation's major research libraries, houses among others the Guido Mazzoni Collection, which comprises over 49,000 rare and hard-to-find Italian pamphlets, newspapers, clippings, small volumes, librettos, epithalamia, and broadsides from the late Sixteenth century to 1943. Also regularly accessible to our students are the resources of, as well as the classes offered by, the nearby Italian Studies program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and those available at our affiliated program at the University of Bologna.
Our Faculty
Roberto Dainotto, Professor. Teaches courses on modern and contemporary Italian culture. His publications include Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Cornell UP, 2000), Europe (in Theory) (Duke UP, 2007), and the edited volume Racconti Americani del ‘900 (Einaudi, 1999). His research interests include the Italian historicist tradition (Vico, Cuoco, Manzoni, Labriola and Gramsci), the formation of national identity between regionalism (including the so-called “Southern Question” and “Jewish Question”) and European integration, and Italian cinema.
Martin Eisner, Assistant Professor. Teaches courses on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. His research focuses on medieval Italian literature. He is in the process of completing his first book, tentatively entitled “The Poetics of Mediation: Boccaccio and the Cultivation of Italian Literature in the Age of Manual Reproduction,” which analyzes Boccaccio’s transcriptions of the vernacular works of Dante, Petrarch, and Cavalcanti in what is now the Vatican's Chigi L V 176. His next book project, “Rematerializing Literary History: The Afterlives of Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’,” continues to integrate philological materials into literary criticism, but takes a diachronic rather than synchronic approach in its analysis of the material tradition of Dante's first book, from its earliest manuscripts to the most recent editions and adaptations. He is also the author of published and forthcoming articles on Petrarch and Boccaccio. His other research interests include medieval lyric poetry, the European novella tradition, and material philology/textual theory/book history.
Luciana Fellin, Assistant Professor of the Practice and Director of Italian Language Program. Teaches courses on Italian sociolinguistics. Her research interests focus on language ideologies, language and identity, Italian American Studies, and second language instruction. She is currently working on a project exploring communicative practices in Italian American communities. Her publications include: “Lost tongues and reinvented repertoires: ideologies of language and creative communicative practices among third generation Italian-Americans,” Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica ed Applicata (Spring, 2008) and “Performance Speech: L'esibizione discorsiva di identità,” in La costruzione interazionale di identità: repertori linguistici e pratiche discorsive degli italiani in Australia, edited by Ciliberti, A. (2007), Milano: Franco Angeli .
Valeria Finucci, Professor of Italian and Theater Studies. Teaches courses on the Renaissance, medical culture, Women’s Studies, the Mediterranean World and anything connected to Venice. She has written on femininity and power in Renaissance discourses in The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto (Stanford, 1992) and on issues of masculinity and paternity in The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Duke, 2003). She is the editor of Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso (Duke, 1999), and of Petrarca: Canoni e esemplarità (Bulzoni, 2006), and co-editor of Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature (Princeton, 1994) and of Generation and Degeneration (Duke, 2001). Building on her interest in Italian genre and gender study, she has edited a 16th century female verse epic, Moderata Fonte's Floridoro, a Chivalric Romance (U. of Chicago P., 2006); a female prose romance, Giulia Bigolina's Urania, a Romance (U of Chicago P, 2005) and now (forthcoming) a female tragedy, Valeria Miani's Celinda (all three also published in Italian). Most recently, her love of Venetian costume books has resulted in a co-edited bilingual volume, Mores Italiae: Costume and Life in the Renaissance (Biblos, 2007).
Michael Hardt, Professor. Teaches courses on the avant-gardes and Italian social movements. Michael Hardt’s recent writings deal primarily with the political, legal, economic, and social aspects of globalization. In his books with Antonio Negri he has analyzed the functioning of the current global power structure (Empire, 2000) and the possible democratic alternatives to that structure (Multitude, 2004). Many of his seminars focus on the work of important figures in the history of critical theory and political theory, such as Marx, Jefferson, Gramsci, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari.
Our Affiliated Faculty
Mark Antliff, Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. Teaches Italian modernism with paricular attention to Futurism.
Caroline Bruzelius, Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. Teaches medieval architecture and urbanism with a particular interest in Southern Italy.
Katharine B. Dubois, Visiting Assistant Professor of History. Teaches on religious beliefs and practices in late-medieval Latin Christendom, especially penance, pilgrimage, penitential devotion, saints’ cults, and relics.
Thomas Ferraro, Professor of English. Teaches Italian-American literature and arts.
Sara Galletti, Assistant Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies. Teaches early modern art history and architectural theory with a particular interest in Italian/French relations.
Peter Lange, Professor of Political Science. Teaches on post-war Italy with particular attention to Italian syndicalism.
Frank Lentricchia, Professor of Literature. Teaches Italian Cinema and Italian-American literature.
John Martin, Research Professor of History. Teaches courses on the cultural history of early modern Western Europe and Venice in particular.
Gianni Toniolo, Research Professor of Social Sciences. Teaches economic history with a focus on Italy.