Graduate Students
Italian
Alexia Ferracuti is in her seventh year of doctoral work in Italian and Renaissance Studies. Tracing the trope of a doubling aesthetic from the Quattrocento to the hybridizing figures of Baroque theatre, her dissertation project points to the centrality of comedy in the Cinquecento with a focus on the convergence between eroticism, performance, gender ambiguity, and the art of dissimulation.
At Yale, Alexia has taught courses in Italian and in Theatre Studies, has served as a Fellow of the Graduate Teaching Center, and was recently also an instructor for the Yale Summer Abroad Program in Siena, Italy.
Education: B.A. English; Renaissance Studies; Italian, summa cum laude (University of California, Santa Barbara; 2005)
History of Art
Area of Interest: 'Prints, printmaking and illustrated books. Art and Humanism. Jews in the Early Modern Period'
History
I joined the History and Renaissance Studies combined degree program in 2007 after graduating from Duke University with degrees in history and French. I am interested in late medieval and early modern Christianity, with a particular emphasis on the Reformation, especially in France. I am interested both in theology and daily religious practice. My orals fields are: Reformation Europe, Early Modern Europe, Inquisitions, Theology in the Age of Reform, and Late Byzantine Liturgical Art. My dissertation uses an affair of exorcism at an early sixteenth-century French convent as an overture to study early modern French Catholicism. Some of the themes I will be exploring include: convent reform, early Protestantism in France, changing demonological beliefs, and female piety. My dissertation adviser is Carlos Eire.
Comparative Literature
'The emergent humanist self-conscious, neo-Latin poetry and autobiography, Renaissance epic, representations of marginalised others (women, Jews, prostitutes) within Renaissance thought'.
English
Area of Interest: Sixteenth- & seventeenth-century literature; reformation theology; biblical translation
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.
History of Art
English
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, "The Arts of Interest: Private Property and the English Literary Imagination, 1640-1700."
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."
Italian
Simona Lorenzini 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 Department. 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.
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.
Spanish & Portuguese
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.
Music
Amy Morris (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.
Classics
Claudia is currently researching and writing her dissertation on the dissemination of Thucydides in 14th and early 15th century Italy. She is particularly interested in the question how Thucydides as a role model for how to write history influenced the development of Florentine Historiography from Leonardo Bruni to Niccolò Machiavelli.
French
I am currently in the first year of my PhD in Renaissance Studies and French Literature. After completing my A.B. in Literature at Harvard University, I earned an M.St. in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford (The Queen's College) with a focus on French literature. I am interested primarily in literature and intellectual history of the Renaissance in England and France, especially the works of Desiderius Erasmus, Guillaume Budé, Thomas More, François Rabelais, George Buchanan, Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, John Donne, John Webster, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Molière, and Blaise Pascal, in the context of the history of education and universities and the history of law and legal theory. I have secondary interests in the late Middle Ages, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust. (April 2012)
English
A second-year student in English and Renaissance Studies, Rebecca's interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century epic and lyric, Renaissance poetic theory, the intersections of religion and poetry, and Biblical hermeneutics.
Spanish & Portuguese
Matthew S. Tanico received his B.A. in Spanish and Italian (summa cum laude) from New York University in 2011. He completed an honors thesis entitled “Cervantes’s Arte Moderno: Theatrical Origins of the Modern Novel” considering the influence of theater on Don Quixote. He is now a Ph.D. student in Spanish and Renaissance Studies at Yale University. His research interests include Cervantes, drama, early modern Spain-Italy relations, and the Baroque.
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.
Recent Graduates:
2012
Jonathan Gnoza
Thesis: Isocrates in Italy
Jonathan Gnoza is teaching Latin and history at St. Paul Catholic High School in Bristol, CT.
Courtney Thomas
Thesis: Honor and Reputation Among the Early Modern English Elite, 1530-
1630
2011
Thesis" Genesis by the Book: Augustinian Literalism in the
Latin Epic Hexaemeron and Milton’s Paradise Lost
Thesis: Honorable Mend: Shame and Guilt in Shakespeare's Rome
Thesis: The Role of Knowledge in Ancient and Renaissance Conceptions of Man
Caroline Starkis a visiting Assistant Professor at Ohio Wesleyan University
