People
Maurizio Albahari
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Albahari is the author of Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; paperback, July 2016). The book was described in the Times Literary Supplement as “indispensable” and in the International Migration Review as “moving … elegantly written, ethnographically and historically rich.” It traces the emergence of the Mediterranean Sea as the world’s deadliest international border for refugees, focusing in particular on the central migratory route — between Libya and Italy — and on the military-humanitarian role of Italian authorities and civil society. Albahari has guest-edited a theme issue of Italian Culture, on migration in Italy [28(2010)2]. His current research is tracing modalities of participatory citizenship and trans-Mediterranean mobilization emerging in the everyday life and aesthetics of maritime spaces, as well as of changing cities in Italy and in the region. It seeks to capture the practice of a public citizenship that is urban and local, but not parochial; coherently political, but not institutionalized; transnational, but not national in the first place. Related scholarly articles have appeared in Anthropology Today, Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropology Now, Anthropology News, Social Research, and (in Italian) InTraformazione. Albahari’s public lectures on Italy/Europe, and contributions in venues including History News Network, openDemocracy, Mobilizing Ideas, Perspektif Magazine, Fox News, and CNN, seek to actively pursue the intersections of engaged citizenship and public scholarship.
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
Professor of Classics
Martin Bloomer’s chief areas of research lie in Roman literature, ancient rhetoric, and the history of education. His books include Valerius Maximus and the Rhetoric of the New Nobility (Chapel Hill 1993), Latinity and Literary Society at Rome (Philadelphia 1997), The Contest of Language (Notre Dame 2005) and The School of Rome (University of California Press, 2011).
Joseph A. Buttigieg
Professor Emeritus of English
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.
Professor of Italian and Albert J. and Helen M. Ravarino Family Director of Italian and Dante 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, Concurrent Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies
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 Emeritus 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 Associate 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
Professor of French and Director of the London Global Gateway
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 Emeritus 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
Associate 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 work on Giacomo Casanova, Lazzaro Spallanzani, the late eighteenth-century Picturesque, Vittorio Alfieri, and Giambattista Vico has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals. Her first book, Ruins Past: Modernity in Italy, 1744-1836, was published in the Voltaire Foundation’s series “Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment.”
Leonardo Francalanci
Assistant Professional Specialist, Catalan and Spanish
Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures during the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance, Mediterranean Studies, Romance Philology.
Marius B. Hauknes
Assistant Professor of Medieval Art History
Marius B. Hauknes is an art historian whose research addresses the intersection of medieval art, science, and theology. His current book project, The Image of the World in Thirteenth-Century Rome, examines encyclopedic wall paintings sponsored by the papacy in relation to the profound changes in the period’s theories of knowledge. Other research interests include medieval cave painting and rock art; historiography of medieval art; and the instrumentality of visual artifacts in medieval astrology and medicine. His publications on monumental painting in thirteenth-century Rome have appeared in Gesta: International Center of Medieval Art and Studies in Iconography.
David Hernandez
Associate 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 of Arts and Letters, Professor of German, Concurrent Professor of Philosophy and Political Science, Founding Director of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study
Professor Hosle's specializations include philosophy (ethics, metaphysics, political philosophy, aesthetics) and intellectual history, and he has written on Dante, Machiavelli, and Giambattista Vico.
Heather Hyde Minor
Professor of 17th-18th Century European Art and Director of the Rome Global Gateway
A historian of European art and architecture from 1600 to 1800, Minor's scholarship focuses on the city of Rome. Her prize-winning book, The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome (Penn State Press, 2010), examines architecture and the history of ideas in the early eighteenth century. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Her new book Piranesi's Lost Words will be published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2015.
Peter Jeffery
Michael P. Grace Chair in Medieval Studies, Professor of Music
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 M. Jensen
Patrick O’Brien Professor of Theology
Jensen’s work on the origins and development of early Christian visual art and architecture particularly concentrates on the monuments of late antique and early medieval Rome. She also studies the embellishment of ritual spaces and the function of sacred images with attention to their liturgical and theological significance. Her published monographs include Understanding Early Christian Art (Routledge, 2000), Face to Face: The Portrait of the Divine in Early Christianity (Fortress Press, 2005), and Christianity in Roman Africa (Eerdmans, 2014). She was a contributing editor for Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art (Yale, 2007), and is co-editor of the Cambridge History of Late Antique Archaeology and the Routledge Companion to Early Christian Art. She currently is completing The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy, forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
Louis Jordan
Associate University Librarian for Academic Services and Collections
Lou is a librarian and a scholar with a doctorate in Medieval Studies. His focus is on integrating library services and collections into the teaching and research missions of the university. He is an elected member of the Comité international de paléographie latine and a fellow of the American Numismatic Society.
Krupali Uplekar Krusche
Associate Professor of Architecture and Associate Dean for Research, Scholarship and Creative Work
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.
Charles L. Leavitt, IV
Assistant Professor of Italian
Professor Leavitt’s interests include modern and contemporary Italian literature and cinema, post-war Italian history, and the intersections between the Italian and African-American experience. He is co-editor of the Italianist film issue and a Visiting Research Fellow of the University of Reading (UK). Prof. Leavitt is currently completing a monograph on Italian neorealism. He has contributed to several books, including World Film Locations: Florence (Intellect Books, 2014); Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas, and Nostalgia in Post-World War II Italian Culture (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018); and The Total Art: Italian Cinema from Silent Screen to Digital Image (Bloomsbury, 2019). Prof. Leavitt’s work has also appeared in leading scholarly publications including Modern Language Notes, Italian Culture, the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, California Italian Studies, Tre Corone, and the Italianist. A fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy, Prof. Leavitt has received an Outstanding Contribution to Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Reading and a Kaneb Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award from the University of Notre Dame.
Luca Lombardo
Visiting Research Assistant Professor
Luca Lombardo specializes in medieval and humanistic Italian literature (both Latin and the vernacular), with a particular focus on Dante, the Florentine cultural environment at the end of the thirteenth century, the reception of Boethius in the medieval philosophical poetry, and Albertino Mussato and early Paduan humanism. His first major monograph, Boezio in Dante. La 'Consolatio Philosophiae' nello scrittoio del poeta (Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2013) is a paradigm-shifting reassessment of the influence of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy on Dante’s works. After receiving his PhD in Italian Studies and Classical and Medieval Philology at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Ca’ Foscari, working on a forthcoming critical review of the Epistole metriche by the early humanist scholar Albertino Mussato (1261–1329). He has published several articles both in journals and in edited collections on Dante and the origins of Italian literature. He is member of the editorial board of the journal «L'Alighieri».
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; Department Chair, History of Christianity
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
Associate Professor, Classics
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 Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe (Yale University Press, 2015).
Margaret Meserve
Associate Professor of History; Fabiano College Chair in Italian Studies; Associate Dean for the Humanities, College of Arts & Letters
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.
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.
Thomas F. X. Noble
Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History, Emeritus
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.
Gretchen Reydams-Schils
Professor, 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
Associate Professor, Ancient Art History; Director of Graduate Studies
Professor Rhodes specializes in the classical art and architecture of Greece. 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
Associate Professor, 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 Emeritus 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, Rome
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
Director of the Graduate Studies for Historic Preservation Program and Professor
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, Ph.D., AIA
Associate Dean; 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.
John P. Welle
Professor of Italian, Emeritus
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.
Demetrio S. Yocum (dyocum@nd.edu)
Research Associate, Center for Italian Studies and the Devers Family Program in Dante Studies
Demetrio Yocum’s research focuses on Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature with particular interest in theology and monasticism. He coordinates the Opera del vocabolario italiano Program at Notre Dame, and performs a range of editorial tasks for the Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature. He also contributes entries to CALMA and MEL (SISMEL, Florence). He is the author of Petrarch’s Humanist Writing and Carthusian Monasticism. The Secret Language of the Self (Brepols, 2013), and co-editor of At the Heart of the Liturgy (Liturgical Press, 2014). His recent translations include: Sorting Out Catholicism (Liturgical Press, 2014), and This Economy Kills: Pope Francis on Capitalism and Social Justice (Liturgical Press, 2015).
Samir Younés
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.
