New Faculty: Assistant Professor of Transnational Italian Studies Luca Zipoli
We're highlighting Bryn Mawr's newest faculty members throughout the semester. The College supports faculty excellence in both research and teaching.
A native of Rome (Italy), Assistant Professor of Transnational Italian Studies Luca Zipoli was trained at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he attended both the undergraduate and the graduate programs. During his Ph.D., he researched and taught as a visiting scholar at Princeton and at New York University.
His main area of specialization is the literary culture of late medieval and early modern Italy, which he addresses in a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, privileging the intersections of fields such as history and visual arts, comparative literature and trans-medial studies, book history, and gender studies. The relationships between historical events, religious beliefs, and literary culture in Renaissance Florence are the main concern of his book-length project, Around The Magnificent: Poetry, Magic and Religion in Early Modern Florence, which he is developing from his Ph.D. dissertation.
His field of scholarly interest also includes the relationships between literature and the figurative arts, and in particular the trans-historical legacies of early modern chivalric epics into modern global arts and media (Alberto Savinio, Giorgio Manganelli, and Alfredo Giuliani among others). He has also researched and published on Modern and Contemporary Italian poetry, with a specific focus on Umberto Saba and more generally on how the theme of otherness (gender & sexuality, race & ethnicity, religion) emerges within the 20th-century Italian poetic tradition.