Emeritus Professor of Italian
Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies, Fellow of Magdalen College
Research
Italian Renaissance Literature; Renaissance Humanism; Renaissance Literary Theory; Renaissance Biography; Alberti; Petrarch; Poliziano; Tasso; The Classical Legacy in Italian Literature; Translation in the Renaissance; Contemporary Italian Fiction; Italo Calvino; Andrea De Carlo; Translation and Translation Studies.
Teaching
Italian language and literature, especially Dante, Renaissance literature from Petrarch to Tasso, post-war fiction especially Calvino, the Italian short story, Translation studies.
Publications
Books and edited books
Editor (with Ingrid D. Rowland and Elisabetta Tarantino), Authority, Innovation and Early Modern Epistemology. Essays in Honour of Hilary Gatti (Oxford: Legenda, 2015)
Editor (with Tristan Kay and Michelangelo Zaccarello), Dante in Oxford. The Paget Toynbee Lectures (Oxford: Legenda, 2011)
Editor (with Zygmunt G. Baranski), Dante the Lyric and Ethical Poet. Dante lirico e etico (Oxford: Legenda, 2010)
Editor (with Guido Bonsaver and Franca Pellegrini), Sinergie narrative. Cinema e letteratura nell’Italia contemporanea (Florence: Cesati, 2008)
Editor (with Birgitte Grundtvig and Lene Waage Petersen), Image, Eye and Art in Calvino: Writing Visibility (Oxford: Legenda, 2007)
Editor (with Peter Hainsworth), Biographies and Autobiographies in Modern Italy (Oxford: Legenda, 2007)
Editor (with Zygmunt G. Baranski), Italy’s Three Crowns. Reading Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007), 126 pp.
Editor (with Letizia Panizza), Petrarch in Britain. Interpreters, Imitators and Translators over 700 Years (OUP, 2007; Proceedings of the British Academy, 146)
Editor, Britain and Italy from Romanticism to Modernism (Oxford: Legenda, 2000)
Italo Calvino, Writers of Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998)
Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance, Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs (Clarendon Press, 1995)
Editor (with R. D. S. Jack, C. Whyte), Leopardi: A Scottis Quair (Edinburgh University Press, 1987)
Translations
Italo Calvino, Collection of Sand (Penguin, 2013)
Italo Calvino, Letters 1941-1985, Selected by Michael Wood (Princeton University Press, 2013)
Italo Calvino, Into the War (Penguin, 2011)
(Co-translator, with Tim Parks and William Weaver) Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics (Penguin, 2009)
Umberto Eco, On Literature (Secker & Warburg, 2005)
Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris. Autobiographical Writings (Cape, 2003)
Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? (Cape, 1999)
(Co-translator, with A. Colquhoun) Italo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (Cape, 1998)
Selected Articles and Book Chapters (from 2000)
'Alberti's Musca: Humour, ethics and the challenge to classical models', in Authority, Innovation and Early Modern Epistemology. Essays in Honour of Hilary Gatti (Oxford: Legenda, 2015), 8-24
'The recovery of Terence in Renaissance Italy: from Alberti to Machiavelli', in The Reinvention of Theatre in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. T. F. Earle and Catarino Fouto (Legenda, 2015), 115-39
'Petrarch and Cicero: Adulation and critical distance', in Brill's Companion to the Reception of Cicero, ed. William H. F. Altman (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2015), 19-38
'Da "Lepidus" a "Leon Battista Alberti": metamorfosi onomastiche e anonimizzazioni nell'Italia del Quattrocento', Albertiana, 16 (2013) [2014] , 5-26
'Boccaccio between Apuleius and Cicero: Bandello's Latin version of Decameron, X. 8 (1509)', Hvmanistica, 8:1 (2013) [2014], 71-82
' "C'e' un furto con scasso in ogni vera lettura": Calvino's thefts from Ariosto', Parole Rubate / Purloined Letters, 7 (giugno, 2013), 139-63: http://www.parolerubate.unipr.it/
'Calvino, Eco e il canone della letteratura mondiale', in Tra Eco e Calvino. Relazioni rizomatiche (University of Toronto, 13-14 April 2012), ed. Rocco Capozzi (Milan: EncycloMedia, 2013), 41-67
'From Lepidus to Leon Battista Alberti: Naming, renaming and anonymizing the self in Quattrocento Italy', Romance Studies, 31:3-4 (2013), 152-66
‘Unité thématique et structurelle dans le De familia d’Alberti’, in ‘Les Livres de la famille’ d’Alberti. Sources, sens et influence, ed. Michel Paoli et al. (Paris: Garnier, 2013), 177-203
'Alberti traduttore di se stesso: Uxoria e Naufragus', in Autotraduzione. Teoria ed esempi fra Italia e Spagna (e oltre), ed. Marcial Rubio Arquez, Nicola D'Antonio (Milan: LED Edizioni, 2012), 77-106
'Alberti's Canis: Structure and sources in the portrait of the artist as a Renaissance dog', Albertiana, 14 (2011), 55-83
'Alberti and the redirection of Renaissance Humanism', Proceedings of the British Academy: 2009 Lectures, 167 (2010), 25-59
'Really reading Calvino in English translation?', in 'Cio' che potea la lingua nostra': Lectures and Essays in Memory of Clara Florio Cooper, ed. Vilma de Gasperin, the italianist, 30 (2010), Special Supplement, 203-20
‘Pessimismo stoico e cultura classica nel Theogenius dell’Alberti’, in Leon Battista Alberti. Actes du Congrès International ‘Gli Este e l’Alberti: Tempo e misura (Ferrara, 29. XI – 3. XII. 2004), ed. Francesco Furlan & Gianni Venturi (Pisa-Rome: Serra, 2010), vol. I, 131-43.
‘The Pre-Raphaelites and Italian Literature’, The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, ed. Colin Harrison and Christopher Newell (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2010), 22-35
‘Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo: Un eccentrico alla ricerca dell’altrove’, in Personaggi stravaganti a Venezia tra ’800 e ’900 (Venice: Antiga, 2010), 141-59
‘Titi Romani Historia: nowela o Tytusie i Gisippie w lacinskim przecladzie Mattea Bandello (1509)’, Odrodzenie ii Reformacja w Polsce, 53 (2010), 167-96
‘Scrivere la Liguria: paesaggio e mondo nelle opere di Calvino’, Scrittori liguri verso il terzo millennio. International Seminar, La Spezia, 18 giugno 2009, ed. Daniela Rapattoni (Pisa-Rome: Serra, 2010), 57-63.
‘I Preraffaelliti e la letteratura italiana’, in I Preraffaeliti. Il sogno del Quattrocento italiano da Beato Angelico a Perugino, da Rossetti a Burne-Jones, ed. Colin Harrison, Christopher Newall, Claudio Spadoni (Milan: Silvana, 2010), 30-37
'Empire, eloquence and military genius: Julius Caesar in Renaissance Italy', in Miriam Griffin (ed.), A Companion to Julius Caesar (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 335-55
‘Alberti and the classical canon’, in Carlo Caruso, Andrew Laird (eds), Italy and the Classical Tradition. Language, Thought and Poetry 1300-1600 (London: Duckworth, 2009), 73-100
‘Alberti e le opere retoriche di Cicerone’, in Leon Battista Alberti e la tradizione. Per lo ‘smontaggio’ dei mosaici albertiani, ed. Roberto Cardini, Mariangela Regoliosi (Florence: Polistampa, 2008), 177-206
‘L’ambigua freschezza dell’Orlando Furioso del 1516’, Italianistica, 37.3 (2008), 159-66
‘Calvino’s rewriting of Marco Polo: from the 1960 screenplay to Invisible Cities’, in Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare A. Iannucci (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008), 182-200
'Calvino and Joyce on the beach: The story of a conversion', in: Twenty Years After: An Irish Calvino?, ed. Roberto Bertoni (Turin/Dublin: Trauben, 2007), 47-63
'Translation or rewriting? Beroaldo’s version of Decameron X, 8', in: Caro Vitto'. Essays in Memory of Vittore Branca, ed. Jill Kraye, Laura Lepschy, Special Supplement 2 of the italianist, 27 (2007), 150-73
'Concessions to autobiography in Calvino', in: Biographies and Autobiographies in Modern Italy (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), 148-67
'Colours, landscapes and the senses in Gli amori difficili', in Image, Eye and Art in Calvino: Writing Visibility (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), 26-47
'Struttura e “sonoritas” in Petrarca («Rvf» 151-60)', in: Il Canzoniere. Lettura micro e macrotestuale, ed. M. Picone (Ravenna: Longo, 2007), 361-82
'Nineteenth-century British biographies of Petrarch', in: Petrarch in Britain. Interpreters, Imitators and Translators over 700 Years (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 319-340
'Intertestualità e struttura nella narrativa di Antonio Tabucchi: da Il gioco del rovescio a Sostiene Pereira', in Il romanzo contemporaneo: Voci italiane, ed. Franca Pellegrini, Elisabetta Tarantino (Leicester: Troubador, 2006), 29-42
'Humanist rewriting and translation: The Latin Griselda from Petrarch to Neri de’ Nerli', Hvmanistica, 1.2 (2006), 23-40
'Tradizione letteraria e originalità del pensiero nel De Re Aedificatoria dell’Alberti', in Leon Battista Alberti teorico delle arti e gli impegni civili del ‘De Re Aedificatoria’, ed. A. Calzona, F. P. Fiore, A. Tenenti, C. Vasoli (Florence: Olschki, 2006), 451-69
'Bilinguismo e strategie retoriche nel De Pictura dell’Alberti', in: Leon Battista Alberti teorico delle arti e gli impegni civili del ‘De Re Aedificatoria’ (Florence: Olschki, 2006), 203-23
'Latin and vernacular from Dante to the age of Lorenzo (1321- c.1500)', in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. II: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis, Ian Johnson (CUP, 2005), 612-25
'Humanist criticism of Latin and vernacular prose', in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. II: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis, Ian Johnson (CUP, 2005), 648-65
'Lightness and multiplicity: the origin and development of Calvino’s poetics', Rivista di Studi Italiani, 21.1 (2003), 42-58
'Biography and autobiography in the Italian Renaissance', in Peter France, William St Clair (eds), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (British Academy, 2002), 37-65
(with Arianna Scicutella), 'Calvino e Conrad: dalla tesi di laurea alle Lezioni americane', Italian Studies, 57 (2002), 113-32
'Le città visibili di Calvino', in La visione dell’invisibile. Saggi e materiali su ‘Le città invisibili’ di Italo Calvino, ed. Mario Barenghi, Gianni Canova, Bruno Falcetto (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), 42-61
'Calvino saggista: anglofilia letteraria e creatività', in Italo Calvino Newyorkese, ed. Anna Botta, Domenico Scarpa (Cava de' Tirreni: Avagliano, 2002), 41-66
'Poliziano's Stanze: post-modern poetics in a proto-Renaissance poem', in Italy in Crisis: 1494, ed. Jane E. Everson & Diego Zancani (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), 129-51