Graduate Students
Noah Dion
Classics
After obtaining undergraduate degrees in English and classics respectively, I went on to earn a master’s degree in classics. I am currently in my fifth year here in the dual program of classics and Renaissance Studies. My dissertation is on the biblical epic of Late Antiquity, with particular attention given to the hexaemeral tradition that extended into the Renaissance and culminated with Milton’s Paradise Lost. My project is not only the culmination of my diverse studies at Yale, but a long-held interest in the classical tradition and its transmission into the Christian age.
My research interests are as follows: Epic; Latin Didacticism; Classical Rhetoric; Late Antiquity; Hexaemeral Literature; Bible as Literature; Postclassical History of Ancient Genres; Poetic Theory before 1700;Religion and Literature; Genre Theory and Criticism; English Renaissance Poetry, especially Spenser and Milton.
Amy Dunagin
History and Music
Amy Dunagin (2007) holds a bachelors degree in history from Yale University, where she wrote a senior thesis on political broadside ballads and their influence in late seventeenth century England. She is pursuing a joint Ph.D. program in music history and Renaissance studies. Her current research focuses on the music of the English Reformation.
Timothy Ellison
Comparative Literature
Received his BA in Classics from California State University, Fresno in 2008, and is now studying in the joint Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies program. His main interest is the reception of philosophical and theological discourses into the English, Italian, Latin, and Greek poetry of the Renaissance. He is also interested in translation and literary theory.
Samuel Fallon
English
Alexia Ferracuti
Italian
Is in her fourth year of doctoral work in Italian and Renaissance Studies. Her current project focuses on the interplay between eroticism, spectacle, and the art of dissimulation in early cinquecento comedy.
B.A. English; Renaissance Studies; Italian, summa cum laude (University of California, Santa Barbara; 2005)
Jamie Gabbarelli
History of Art
'Prints, printmaking and illustrated books. Art and Humanism. Jews in the Early Modern Period'
Erin Glunt
History
Joined the Renaissance Studies/History program in the Fall of 2007 after graduating from Duke University with a degree in History and French studies. My research interests are late medieval and early modern European history, specifically religious history. My dissertation is a study of early modern French Catholicism through the lens of an exorcism at an early sixteenth-century convent in Lyon.
Jonathan Gnoza
Classics
Patrick Gray
English
Elizabeth Harper
Comparative Literature
'The emergent humanist self-conscious, neo-Latin poetry and autobiography, Renaissance epic, representations of marginalised others (women, Jews,
prostitutes) within Renaissance thought'.
Andrew Kau
English
Andrew focuses on the poetry of the English Renaissance, particularly Milton. Other interests include humanism, rhetoric, reception of the classics, and the history of criticism.
Michael Komorowski
English
I am in my fourth year in the joint English and Renaissance Studies programs. My interests include the history of political thought, literature and economics, law and literature, and early modern reception of the classics. I am currently researching a dissertation on the intersections of seventeenth-century commercial society, models of political obligation, and literature in England including major writers John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and John Locke and lesser-known figures such as Edmund Waller, Slingsby Bethel, Abraham Cowley, and Marchamont Nedham. My dissertation is entitled, "Interested Citizens: Commercial Society, Self-Interest, and the Development of the Modern State in England, 1640-1700."
Hans Leaman
History
Graduate student in the History Department and Renaissance Studies program, focusing on religious and cultural history in Northern Europe. His dissertation examines the use of banishment as a punishment for religious non-conformity in the Reformation era and the influence that exile had on the development of early modern ecclesiology. Carlos Eire is his advisor. He received his A.B. from Princeton and a J.D. from Yale Law School."
Simona Lorenzini
Italian
Graduated, cum laude, from the University of Pisa in 2003 with a thesis in Modern Italian Literature. After obtaining a Ph.D. in “Humanist and Renaissance Civilization” from the “Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento” (Florence, 2008), she is currently a first year graduate student in the Italian and Renaissance Studies. Her areas of interest include the study of bucolic poetry of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, of Philology and Medieval-humanistic Latin, and also the digital treatment of texts.
James Ross Macdonald
English
Graduate student in English and Renaissance Studies.
His primary academic interest is in the culture of post-Reformation England, with a dissertation in progress on the connections between the forms of popular religion and literature in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Before coming to Yale, he taught high school English in Long Branch, N.J.
Ricardo Monsalve C.
Spanish & Portuguese
Second year. He received his B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature (2004) and his Master's degree in Literature (2007) from the University of Chile.
Interests: Medieval, Golden Age and Colonial Spanish Literature, especially Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana and the Arauco war; Renaissance epic poetry; Dante Alighieri's Divina commedia and its relationship with Erich Auerbach's work.
Claudia Rammelt
Classics
Claudia has a background in Greek, Latin and Italian from the universities of Halle (Saale), Göttingen, and Berlin. In 2007 she graduated from the Freie Universität of Berlin. For her final thesis she researched the dynamics of autonomy and heteronomy in the field of Classics in the former German Democratic Republic, focusing specifically on the scholarly work dedicated to Thucydides. At Humboldt Universität zu Berlin as a TA she has also taught courses on Greek Grammar, Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, Herodotus, and Thucydides. In her future research she wants to explore the history of historiography from its Greek beginnings to the Renaissance and Early Modern discourse regarding what history is and what historiography should be.
Caroline Stark
Classics
Caroline Stark is a doctoral candidate in Classics and Renaissance Studies. Her dissertation, The Role of Knowledge in Ancient and Renaissance Conceptions of Man, explores ancient stories of the birth and development of man and their reception among Italian humanists. Her research interests include ancient and Renaissance cosmology, anthropology, and foundation literature; Renaissance Humanism; and the reception of classical antiquity in the Renaissance. She has published on the reception of Ovid in Dante’s La Divina Commedia, and her essay, “The Renaissance Reception of Manilius’ Anthropology,” will appear in the forthcoming volume, Forgotten Stars: Rediscovering Manilius’ Astronomica, with Oxford University Press.
Antonio J. Templanza
English
"A second-year student from the English department, J. Antonio Templanza's interests include poetry (notably Milton), the epic genre, sacred texts broadly imagined, histories of idealism, and aesthetics. His current research focuses on utopias and related imagined communities."
Courtney Thomas
History
I am in the History and Renaissance Studies joint degree program working with Keith Wrightson on early modern British history. My dissertation is tentatively titled ?Honor and Reputation Among the Early Modern English Elite, 1530-1630? and I have advanced to candidacy. I received my BA (honors) degree in history from the University of Alberta and in 2005 I received an MA in history from the same institution and I am the holder of a four year doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My main areas of interest are the social and political history of the Tudor and Jacobean courts, gender construction and role maintenance at the social level in early modern England more broadly, the political and cultural roles of early modern queens (both consort and regnant) and elite women, ceremony and the symbolics of display at early modern European courts, and the honor culture of early modern England.
Justine Walden
History
My interests are (1) early modern religion and social history; (2) heresy, inquisition and persecution; and (3) the history of the book (scribal culture and the transition to print; bibliography in general) and the ways in which these three areas intersect. My geographic and temporal focus is late medieval/early modern Italy with occasional forays into England.
My background is in Philosophy (UC Berkeley), and American Studies (Social History, Art History) at UPenn.
