SCHOLAR
My work as a scholar has traced issues of women and power in early modern Italy. My primary work has focused on seventeenth-century Venice, although more recently I have also worked on fifteenth- century Milan and Naples. Most broadly, I am interested in how women, through their writing, were able to exert power in systems that did not formally recognize female authority.
PROFESSOR
I aim to fulfill the GW Italian program’s mission of introducing students, through diverse critical perspectives, to Italy’s rich cultural traditions while honing their critical thinking, research, and writing skills. Through the medium of Italian culture, I seek to spark my students’ passion for and to encourage their critical examination of creative human expression across time.
AUTHOR
My research, which has as its raw materials little-known printed texts and newly discovered archival documents, interweaves literary studies, history (including history of the book and material culture), religious studies, gender studies, and Jewish studies. Translation – in the full sense of carrying across, as well as in the more specific sense of language transfer – underpins all of my scholarship. Through interpretation and contextualization, I seek to make texts intelligible across time and cultures, and through literary translation, I aim to disseminate the writing of the women I study, amplifying their voices and promoting further study of them in a broad range of fields.