Albert Russell Ascoli, Ph.D. Cornell University 1983. His principal field of research and teaching is Medieval and Early Modern Italian culture from the 13th to the 16th centuries.

His interests include the relations between literary form and history; the author-reader relationship; the construction of Italian national identity; literary politics of gender; Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Ariosto, Shakespeare. His most recent books are Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge, 2008) and A Local Habitation, and a Name: Imagining Histories in the Italian Renaissance (Fordham, 2011). He has edited several essay collections including Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (with Krystyna von Henneberg; Berg, 2001), a double issue of Renaissance Drama titled “Italy and the Drama of Europe” (with William West, 2010) and Italian Futures, an issue of the electronic journal California Italian Studies (with Randolph Starn, 2011). He has held a number of fellowships, including the NEH-Mellon Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome (2004-2005), was recently elected “membro straniero” of the Academy of the Istituto Lombardo and is currently serving as President of the Dante Society of America. He has recently completed editing the Cambridge Companion to Petrarch (with Unn Falkeid, 2015), and his current research project is a study of the problem of fede (faith) as promise and belief in the early modern period.

For a complete bibliography of publications, click here.