SIMS / Italian Studies Fellows

This annual invited fellowship is sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies, the Italian Studies section of the Department of Romance Languages, and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The recipient spends one week at Penn working on manuscript material from the library’s collections of rare books and manuscripts, offering, in exchange, a graduate-student workshop and a lecture on the research conducted while in residence.

Isabella Magni, University of Sheffield (2024 – 2025)

Isabella Magni is lecturer in digital humanities in the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI) at the University of Sheffield. Her research stands at the intersection between digital philology and digital editing, text and data analysis, cultural analytics, digital archives, mediaeval and early modern studies, mercantile and transcultural mediaeval cultures. She is the principal investigator of the project Petrarchive: An Edition of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and co-investigator of the project SCWAReD (Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination).

Public Lecture: From Manuscript to Print to Digital: Petrarch and the Renaissance Filter, held in-person and online, Thursday, April 10, 2024, 5:15PM, Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. Register here.

David Lines, University of Warwick (2023 – 2024)

David Lines is Professor of Renaissance Philosophy and Intellectual History and the Director of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. As a specialist in Renaissance philosophy and intellectual history, his research has focused on the legacy of ancient thought (particularly Aristotelian moral and natural philosophy) in Latin and the vernacular in Italy. His interests, however, reach across Europe, particularly to France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries. His most recent publication The Dynamics of Learning in Early Modern Italy: Arts and Medicine at the University of Bologna (2023) studies the changing configuration of the disciplines at the University of Bologna.

Public Lecture: Traces of University Teaching in Renaissance Books: Examples and Problems, held in-person and online, Wednesday, March 13, 2024, 5:15P–6:30PM, Class of ‘55 Conference Room, Room 241, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, 2nd Floor, University of Pennsylvania. Register here.

Laura Banella, University of Notre Dame (2022 – 2023)

Laura Banella is an assistant professor in Italian at the University of Notre Dame and a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie in medieval Italian literature. Her research has focused on Dante and Boccaccio and on the books transmitting their works (13th-16th century). She has also worked on reception, the history of literary criticism, Renaissance literature, and the female auctor. Her recent publications include La ‘Vita nuova’ del Boccaccio. Fortuna e tradizione (Rome-Padua: Antenore, 2017) and Rime e libri delle rime di Dante tra Medioevo e primo Rinascimento (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2020).

Lecture: Dante vs Dante: Material Traditions of the Lyric and the Construction of Poetic Authority, held in-person and online, Thursday, March 16, 2023, 5:15PM, Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. Register at the website.

Bryan C. Keene, Riverside City College (2020 – 2021, postponed to 2021 – 2022)

Bryan C. Keene teaches art history at Riverside City College. Previously, he was a curator in the Department of Manuscripts at Getty Museum, where he began his career in the arts as an educator. He holds a PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London and his edited volume, “Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts,” is available from Getty Publications (2019).

Lecture: Masters in Miniature: Future Horizons for Italian Manuscript Studies, held online, Friday, February 11, 2022, 1:00PM EST. View available recording.

Maddalena Signorini, University of Rome Tor Vergata (2019 – 2020)

Maddalena Signorini is professor of Latin Paleography and Codicology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy. Her research focuses on medieval literacy, on the first writing in Romance vernaculars, and in more recent years, on Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s handwriting, books, and libraries. During her fellowship, she will examine a selection of fifteenth-century Italian manuscripts with the aim of setting them in the broader context of Italian book production.

Lecture: Texts on Flyleaves. An Investigation on Petrarch’s Writing Uses, held Thursday, February 27, 2020, 5:15PM, Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. View available recording.

Rhiannon Daniels, University of Bristol (2018 – 2019)

Rhiannon Daniels is Senior Lecturer in Italian in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol in England. Her research focuses on medieval and Renaissance culture, reception studies, and the history of the book, with a focus on finding ways of using the material form of manuscripts and printed books to (re)construct histories of reading and book production techniques. During her fellowship, she will be examining manuscript rubrics and annotations in Renaissance copies of Boccaccio’s Decameron.

Lecture: Writing and Reading Rubrics in the Renaissance Decameron, held Thursday, January 24, 2019, 5:00PM, Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.