People
Maurizio Albahari
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Albahari focuses on immigration in Italy from a social-cultural perspective, with an emphasis on citizenship and integration, political participation in the public sphere, and Catholic-Muslim relations. He has guest-edited a related issue of Italian Culture [28(2010)2]; recent articles have also been published in the ISIM Review and in the International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies.
Zygmunt G. Baranski
Notre Dame Professor of Dante and Italian Studies and Emeritus Serena Professor of Italian, University of Cambridge
Professor Baranski is among the world's leading authorities on Dante, medieval Italian literature, medieval poetics, and modern Italian literature, film, and culture. His publications include Petrarch and Dante. Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition (Co-editor Theodore Cachey. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); "Chiosar con altro testo". Leggere Dante nel Trecento (Florence: Cadmo, 2001); Dante e i segni. Saggi per una storia intellettuale di Dante (Naples: Liguori, 2000); Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture (Co-editor Rebecca West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Pasolini Old and New. Surveys and Studies (Ed. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999); "Sole nuovo, luce nuova". Saggi sul rinnovamento culturale in Dante (Turin: Scriptorium, 1996).
W. Martin Bloomer
Associate Professor of Classics
Professor Bloomer’s chief areas of research lie in Latin literature, ancient rhetoric, and ancient education. His books include Latinity and Literary Society at Rome (Philadelphia 1997) and The School of Rome (University of California Press, 2011).
Joseph A. Buttigieg
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, Co-Chair, Italian Studies
Joseph A. Buttigieg's main interests are modern literature, critical theory, and the relationship between culture and politics. He is the editor and translator of the multi-volume complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, and a founding member and executive secretary of the International Gramsci Society. The Italian Minister of Culture appointed him to a commission of experts to oversee the preparation of the "edizione nazionale" of Gramsci's writings.
Theodore J Cachey Jr.
Albert J. and Helen M. Ravarino Family Director of Dante and Italian Studies, Co-Chair of Italian Studies
Theodore Cachey is professor and director of Italian Studies at Notre Dame. He specializes in Italian Medieval and Renaissance literature. He has authored, edited and co-edited several books, including Le isole fortunate (1994); Pigafetta's First Voyage Around the World (1995, 2007); Dante Now (1995); Petrarch's Guide to the Holy Land (2002), Le culture di Dante (2004), Dante and Petrarch: Anti-dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition (2009). His essays have appeared in Annali d'Italianistica, Belfagor, California Italian Studies, Intersezioni, The Italianist, Italica, The History of Cartography, Modern Language Notes, Schede umanistiche, and Rivista di letteratura italiana.
Paolo G. Carozza
Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International Graduate Programs
Paolo Carozza's expertise is in the areas of comparative law, human rights, and international law, and many of his writings in these areas have been published in Italian books and journals. He teaches regularly at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy. In 2004 he was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Milan, and in 2011 will return to Italy as a Fulbright Senior Researcher at the University of Florence, where he will be working on a book regarding the jurisprudence of the Italian Constitutional Court.
Robert Randolf Coleman
Associate Professor of Art History
Coleman works primarily on Italian art from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. He has written on the art of sixteenth-century Lombardy and Piedmont, and has worked extensively on Italian old master drawings, including those in the collection of the Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, published in A Corpus of Drawings in Midwestern Collections: Sixteenth-Century Italian Drawings. 2 vols., 2008 and 2010. He has co-curated with Babette Bohn, The Art of Disegno: Italian Prints and Drawings from the Georgia Museum of Art, 2008, an exhibition which was shown in the Snite Museum of Art in 2009. His monograph, The Ambrosiana Albums of Giambettino Cignaroli (1706-1770): A Critical Catalogue was published in 2011. He is also the author and Project Director of the Inventory-Catalogue of the Drawings in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, an on-going web site inventory with scanned images. The Ambrosiana Project is housed in the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame, which conserves a photographic archive of drawings and manuscripts in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Coleman lectures on the Renaissance in Florence, Rome, Venice, Northern Italy, and on the Italian Baroque. Seminars have focused on Italian Mannerism, Italian drawings (in conjunction with the Snite Museum), and on eighteenth-century European art with special attention given to important centers as Rome and Venice.
Kathleen Sprows Cummings
Associate Professor of American Studies, Concurrent Professor of History and Theology, William and Anna Jean Cushwa Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism
Cummings' areas of teaching and research include the history of women, immigration, and religion in the United States. She published her first book, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era, in 2009 with the University of North Carolina Press. Cummings is working on a new book, Citizen Saints: Catholics and Canonization in American Culture, for which project she received and NEH Fellowship. In June 2014, Cummings led (with John McGreevy) Italian Studies at Notre Dame’s fourth annual Rome Seminar, which addressed transatlantic approaches to the study of American Catholicism, with a particular focus on connections between Italy and the United States. Cummings serves as co-director (with Tim Matovina and Robert Orsi) of The Cushwa Center’s “Lived History of Vatican II Projects,” which explores the local implementation of the Council in fifteen dioceses on six continents. She oversees the History of Women Religious, an academic organization devoted to the historical study of Catholic sisters in the United States. Cummings often serves as a media commentator on contemporary events in the Church.
JoAnn Della Neva
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, Professor of French
Professor DellaNeva specializes in Renaissance Literature, with a particular interest in Renaissance love poetry, Franco-Italian literary relations in the Renaissance, women writers of the Renaissance, literary imitation, and European Petrarchism. She has recently completed a long-term project on the imitation of minor Italian poets in the poetry of the Pleiade.
Dennis P. Doordan
Professor of Architecture
Dennis Doordan, an architectural & design historian, museum consultant and co- editor of Design Issues, is the author of Building Modern Italy: Italian Architecture 1914-1936, and has published widely on architecture, urbanism and design in Italy.
Margot Fassler
Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy
Professor Fassler’s interests include sacred music, the liturgy of the Latin Middle Ages, medieval liturgical drama, and Mariology.
Sabrina Ferri
Assistant Professor of Italian
Ferri’s area of specialization is the Italian eighteenth century, with an interdisciplinary focus on literature and its relationship to the visual arts, the sciences, history, and material culture. She has written on Giacomo Casanova and on Giambattista Vico and has contributed to the UTET Thematic Dictionary of Universal Literature. Her present research focuses on the significance of material and metaphorical ruination within the artistic, philosophical, and scientific domains of late eighteenth-century Italy.
Leonardo Francalanci
Visiting Instructor, Romance Languages and Literatures
Leonardo Francalanci specializes in Romance philology and Comparative Romance literatures with a particular interest in the Western Mediterranean (Catalan, Spanish, Italian, Occitan and French). To date, his research has focused mainly on Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Catalan, Spanish and Italian literatures, European Petrarchism, Latin humanism, Romance linguistics, and Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Catalan and Italian literatures. As a scholar and teacher he is deeply invested in cultivating not only an understanding of the particularities of a specific tradition, but also in transmitting a clear perspective of the complex network of synergies, contacts and exchanges that link together the languages, cultures and literatures that have evolved throughout the ages within the larger Mediterranean.
Bernd Goehring
Assistant Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies
Bernd Goehring studied Philosophy, Theology, Italian Philology and Medieval Studies at Bonn, Florence, Oxford and Cornell. Goehring specializes in medieval philosophy. He is particularly interested in medieval and Renaissance theories of cognition, including accounts of intellect and will, faith and reason, and the relation between knowledge and happiness. His current research focuses on Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, Giles of Rome, and their contemporaries. He regularly exchanges ideas with European colleagues in Italy and beyond, most recently at conferences in Palermo and Parma and at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.
David Hernandez
Assistant Professor of Classics
Professor Hernandez is an archaeologist of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. His research focuses on ancient urbanism in Epirus, Roman imperialism, and the topography of ancient Rome. An expert in excavation methods and complex urban stratigraphy, he directed excavations in the ancient urban center of Butrint that resulted in the discovery of the city's Roman forum in 2005. He also has directed archaeological field projects at the Hellenistic villa at Mursi and at the ancient city of Amantia in Albania. His research projects examine Greek and Roman urbanism in the context of economics, trade, and colonization in the ancient Mediterranean.
Vittorio Hösle
Paul G. Kimball Chair, German/Russian Languages & Literatures
Professor Hosle's specializations include philosophy (ethics, metaphysics, political philosophy, aesthetics) and intellectual history, and he has written on Dante, Machiavelli, and Giambattista Vico.
Peter Jeffery
Michael P. Grace Chair in Medieval Studies
Professor Jeffery wrote his dissertation (Princeton University 1980) on “The Autograph Manuscripts of Francesco Cavalli,” an opera composer who lived in 17th-century Venice. His stay in Venice was supported by a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Fund for Research in Venice. Since then he has spent most of his time working on medieval chant and the early history of liturgical music, particularly in Rome. He is now working on a translation with commentary of Ordo Romanus Primus, an 8th-century text that is the earliest description of the Roman Mass as celebrated by the Pope.
Robin Kirkpatrick
Professor Emeritus of Italian and English Literatures, University of Cambridge (Robinson College)
Visiting Distinguished Professor of Religion and Literature, PhD in Literature, Notre Dame
Robin Kirkpatrick is particularly interested in Dante and in the relationship between Italian and English literature from 1300 to 1600. His books include Dante’s Paradiso and the Limitations of Modern Criticism (1978), Dante’s Inferno: Difficulty and Dead Poetry (1987), The European Renaissance, 1400 – 1600 (2002); and English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare: A Study of Source, Analogue and Divergence (1995). Professor Kirkpatrick’s verse translation of the Commedia with notes and commentary was published by Penguin Classics: Inferno (2006); Purgatorio (2007); and Paradiso (2007). A full collection of his own poetry was published in 2013 and verse is now his main preoccupation. At Notre Dame, he is teaching a course for the PhD Literature Program, "Searching Scripture: Literature in a Biblical Light," in the Fall of 2014, and involved in a number of other activities for the development of Religion and Literature.
Krupali Uplekar Krusche
Assistant Professor of Architecture
Professor Uplekar Krusche teaches architectural design, historic preservation and structural design in the School of Architecture. In 2007, she started the DHARMA (Digital Historic Architectural Research and Material Analysis) research lab that is specializing in 3D documentation of World Heritage Sites. In July 2010, she led a team of faculty and students to the Roman Forum, Rome, Italy---the centralized area around which ancient Roman civilization developed. The team used conventional and innovative methods to measure, document, and draw large areas of the historic site in order to accurately study the monuments and ruins on site.
Louis Jordan
Director of Rare Books and Special Collections
Louis Jordan is the Director of Rare Books and Special Collections. He specializes in paleography, manuscript studies and early imprints. Among his publications are three volumes of the Inventory of Western Manuscripts In the Biblioteca Ambrosiana covering the fondi A-E superiore. He has also written on early Dante imprints and is working on a catalog of dated and datable manuscripts in the Ambrosiana.
Anne Leone
Research Assistant Professor
Anne Leone earned a Ph.D. in Italian from the University of Cambridge in 2010 where she was a Gates scholar. At Notre Dame, she is doing research on the issue of nature in Dante and medieval culture, while revising her Doctoral dissertation, 'Sangue perfetto': Scientific, Sacrificial and Semiotic Blood in Dante, into a monograph. She also does administrative duties for Italian Studies.
Sabine G. MacCormack
(1941-2012)
Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C. College of Arts and Letters Chair, jointly appointed in History and Classics
Timothy Matovina
Professor of Theology, William and Anna Jean Cushwa Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism
Timothy Matovina works in the area of Theology and Culture, with specialization in U.S. Catholic and U.S. Latino theology and religion.
Elizabeth Forbis Mazurek
Chair of the Department of Classics, Co-chair of Italian Studies
Mazurek’s interests include Latin literature, Roman epigraphy, Roman history, and women and gender in classical antiquity. Her book, Municipal Virtues in the Roman Empire (Teubner 1996), examines the epigraphical language of praise in Roman municipalities during the empire. Her current research focuses on Roman Elegy.
Barry McCrea
Professor of English, Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies
Barry McCrea is a scholar of comparative literature and a novelist. His research focuses on modern literature in English, French, Irish, Italian, and Spanish. As well as articles and essays about modern Irish and European literature, he is the author of The First Verse, a novel, which won the 2006 Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction, In the Company of Strangers: Narrative and Family in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce and Proust (Columbia University Press, 2011), and of the forthcoming Minor Languages and the Modern Literary Imagination (Yale University Press).
Margaret Meserve
Associate Professor of History
Margaret Meserve is a historian of the Italian Renaissance with special interests in Renaissance humanism and history-writing, the history of the book, the papal court, and the urban history of Renaissance Rome. Her prize-winning first book, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Harvard, 2008) explored how Renaissance humanists understood, reconstructed, or invented narratives of historical identity for contemporary Islamic powers, above all the Ottoman Empire. She is also the editor of Pope Pius II's autobiographical Commentaries for Harvard's I Tatti Renaissance Library. Her current project, The News Cycle in Renaissance Rome, examines the circulation of information and the production of printed news and political texts, both Latin and Italian, in Rome in the first half century of print, ca. 1470-1527. A graduate of Harvard University and the Warburg Institute in London, she has received grants and fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, American Academy in Rome, I Tatti, and the Newberry Library, where she is spending this year as an NEH research fellow.
Christian Moevs
Associate Professor of Italian
Professor Moevs's interests include Dante, medieval Italian literature, lyric poetry and poetics, and the intersection between literature and philosophy (especially metaphysics and medieval philosophy). He is co-editor of the Devers Series in Dante Studies, and a fellow of the Medieval Institute. His The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy (Oxford UP and American Academy of Religion, 2005) won the Modern Language Association's Marraro Prize for Italian Studies, and the American Association for Italian Studies Prize for the best book of 2005. He is currently working on a book on Dante and the medieval contemplative (mystical) tradition, for which he has won a second NEH Fellowship.
Vittorio Montemaggi
Assistant Professor of Religion and Literature
Professor Montemaggi's interests include the relationship between literary and theological reflection, the relationship between language, truth and love, and the interconnections between the question of the relationship between theism and atheism and that of the relationship between tragedy and comedy. To date, his published work has focused primarily on Dante's Commedia, while his current research also comparatively explores, alongside the work of Dante, that of Primo Levi, Roberto Benigni, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Augustine and Aquinas.
Thomas F. X. Noble
Department Chair and Professor of History
Noble’s interests lie in the history of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. He is interested particularly in the art, theology, and political culture of this period. He recently published an edited volume From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms (London: Routledge, 2006) dealing with the transformation of the Roman Empire. He is currently working on a history of the papacy from the origins to 1046 and is also collecting materials for a history of the idea of Rome in the Middle Ages.
Pierpaolo Polzonetti
Assistant Professor, Program of Liberal Studies
Pierpaolo Polzonetti, home-based in the Program of Liberal Studies, holds a Laurea degree in Letters from the University of Rome La Sapienza and a PhD in musicology from Cornell. Polzonetti specializes in Italian opera and 18th-century music and culture. His first book, Giuseppe Tartini e la musica secondo natura (Lucca, 2001) has received the “premio internazionale di Studi Musicali” granted by the Petrassi Institute and his essay on Mozart¹s Così fan tutte has been awarded the Einstein Prize. He is the coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera and the author of Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (Cambridge University Press, in print).
Gretchen Reydams-Schils
Professor and Chair, Program of Liberal Studies
Reydams-Schils specializes in the traditions of Platonism and Stoicism. She is the author several books, including The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection (University of Chicago Press, 2005). In 2008 she organized in cooperation with the Catholic University of Milan an international conference on Stobaeus, to which L'Osservatore Romano devoted an article. A collection of papers on this topic is scheduled to appear in the fall of 2010.
Robin Francis Rhodes
Professor of Art History
Professor Rhodes specializes in the classical art and architecture of Greece, Italy. As director of the Project for the Study and Publication of the Greek Stone Architecture at Corinth he has created and curated a major exhibit and monograph on the 7th century BCE temple on Temple Hill, the first truly monumental temple in Greece.
Denis Robichaud
Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies
Denis J.-J. Robichaud works on Italian Humanists, including philosophy, philology, and rhetoric in the Renaissance. His current research engages with various aspects of Renaissance humanism: the history of philosophy and philology, humanist commentary and textual practices (reading and writing), manuscript annotations, Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, and the fortune of classical and humanist texts.
Charles M. Rosenberg
Professor of Art History
Among Professor Rosenberg's many scholarly interests are Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art, Renaissance coinage, and Renaissance Ferrara. He is the editor, most recently, of The Court Cities of Northern Italy: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Rimini, Pesaro, Urbino. New York and Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Ingrid Rowland
Professor of Architecture
Ingrid Rowland writes and lectures on Classical Antiquity, the Renaissance, and the Age of the Baroque for general as well as specialist readers. She is the author of The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (1998) and, most recently, Giordano Bruno, Philosopher/Heretic (2008).
Catherine Schlegel
Associate Professor of Classics
Schlegel’s research interests include Latin and Greek poetry and issues involving violence as a tool for identity formation. Schlegel is the author of Satire and the Threat of Speech: Horace’s Satires, Book I (Wisconsin, 2005), which considers the consequences of satiric speech for its speaker and for its audience. She is also author of a translation of Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days (Michigan, 2006), in collaboration with the poet Henry Weinfield.
Steven Semes
Associate Professor of Architecture
Professor Semes was Academic Director of the School of Architecture’s Rome Studies Program from 2008 to 2011 and continues to teach there and on campus. His interest is the classical tradition in architecture and urbanism, with particular focus on the design of new architecture in harmony with historic settings. He is the author of The Architecture of the Classical Interior and The Future of the Past: A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism, and Historic Preservation. In 2010 received the Clem Labine Award from Restore Media and Traditional Building magazine, and in September 2011 was profiled in the Wall Street Journal. His next book will showcase the traditional architecture and urbanism of early twentieth-century Rome.
John W. Stamper
Associate Dean and Professor of Architecture
John Stamper is an architect and architectural historian and the author of several books including The Architecture of Roman Temples: The Republic to the Middle Empire. He specializes in Ancient Roman Architecture, Architectural History and Theory, Historic Preservation, and Twentieth-Century Architecture and Design.
Loren Valterza
Visiting Assistant Professor, Italian Studies
Dr. Valterza specializes in Italian medieval literature and legal philosophy (medieval and modern). His research interests include: literary and legal interpretation theory, philosophical hermeneutics, and Dante. He has published on the medieval juridical conventions of torture, confession, and fama in the Divine Comedy and on the role of Roman law in the Commedia and broader medieval juridical culture, and is currently writing a book on the constitutive role of language and dialogue in communities.
John P. Welle
Professor of Italian, Concurrent Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre
Professor Welle focuses on twentieth-century Italian literature and culture. His edition and translation, with Ruth Feldman, Peasants Wake for Fellini’s Casanova and Other Poems by Andrea Zanzotto (1997), won the Raiziss-De Palchi Book Prize from the American Academy of Poets. He is the author of The Poetry of Andrea Zanzotto (1987), and the editor of Film and Literature, Annali d’Italianistica (1988). He serves on the editorial boards of Italian Culture, Quaderni d’Italianistica, and PSA: the Journal of the Pirandello Society of America.
Carroll William Westfall
Frank Montana Professor of Architecture
Professor Westfall, Frank Montana Professor and Chairman of the School of Architecture from 1998 to 2002, devoted his initial work to the Early Renaissance in Rome and elsewhere in Italy. He is the author of a study of Renaissance Rome, In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447‑1455, University Park and London (Pennsylvania State University Press), 1974. More recent publications have concerned Pompeii's urban character.
Demetrio S. Yocum
Research Associate
Demetrio S. Yocum’s research focuses on Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature with particular interest in theology and monasticism. As the coordinator of the Opera del vocabolario italiano (OVI) Program at Notre Dame, he revises and writes entries for the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO). He also contributes entries to the Compendium Auctorum Latinorum Medii Aevi (CALMA), and Medioevo latino (MEL). His most recent publications include: Petrarch’s Humanist Writing and Carthusian Monasticism. The Secret Language of the Self (Brepols, 2013); At the Heart of the Liturgy (co-editor), and Sorting Out Catholicism (translator), both from Liturgical Press, and forthcoming in 2014.
Samir Younés
Associate Professor of Architecture
Samir Younés, Director of Rome Studies in Architecture 1999-2008, teaches traditional urbanism and architecture, and architectural theory with a focus on Italy and the history of Rome. He was editor of Ara Pacis Controprogetti/ Counterprojects (Alinea, Florence, 2002), and co-editor with Ettore Mazzola of: Como, La modernità della tradizione / The Modernity of Tradition (Gangemi, Rome, 2003), Barletta, La disfida urbana, (Gangemi, Roma, 2005). In 2003, he served on a Scientific Committee that advised the Italian Ministry of Cultural Affairs on architectural issues related to museums, and his architectural project for the island of Pantelleria was exhibited at the Biennale di Venezia, Autumn, 2006.
