Dr Rebecca Bowen is a postdoctoral research associate on the AHRC project 'Envisioning Dante, c. 1472-c. 1630: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page'. She is also an associate scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut.
Rebecca received her PhD from the University of Oxford in 2020. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Figures of Love: Amor from Antiquity to the Italian Middle Ages’, the basis of her first monograph, won the Society for Italian Studies Postgraduate Prize. Since 2021 she has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut. She began teaching Italian literature at Oxford with a focus on Dante and medieval lyric in 2017 and has been a Lecturer at Pembroke College. Her research focuses on the visual, literary, and material culture of the Italian peninsula in the late medieval and early modern periods and explores classical reception and intermedial relations. Her specialisms include the works of Dante, Text/Image Studies, the iconography of love, and history of the early printed book.
Between 2023 and 2024, Rebecca directed a TORCH Knowledge Exchange project that explored historical copies of Dante's Commedia in Oxford University Libraries and led to the creation of a new series of artworks by the printmaker Wuon-Gean Ho. You can read more about the collaboration at this link: https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/seeing-dantes-commedia-in-print-from-the-renaissance-to-today#tab-4754501. The exhibition catalogue, 'Looking for Dante', is freely available as an open access publication through the Oxford University Research Archive.
Teaching Specialisms
Dante - Paper IX
Italian Medieval Poetry - Paper VI
Italian Lyric Poetry - Paper III
Digital Projects
‘Dante Depicted: A Commentary on Image, Text, and Exegesis around the Commedia’, founder and editor, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Insitut, DOI: 10.17617/1.97. https://dante.khi.fi.it/
Edited Volumes
Looking for Dante: Exploring the 'Divine Comedy' in Print from the 15th Century to Today, ed. Rebecca Bowen (Taylor Institution Library: Oxford, 2024). ISBN-13: 9781838464196. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:43ea410b-2e64-4c81-8a97-5348d8c004d6/files/s3484zj61t
Selected Publications
Rebecca Bowen, ‘Modernizing Myths at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century: Dante, the Leandreride, and an Illustrated Ovid’, Dante Studies 141 (2023): 121-148. https://doi.org/10.1353/das.2023.a930673
Rebecca Bowen, ‘Occhi Fissi’: Fixing the Gaze in Dante’s Commedia’, Italian Studies 78:1, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2022.2158272
Rebecca Bowen, ‘Chapter 13’ in Dante's "Vita Nova": A Collaborative Reading, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski, Heather Webb (Notre Dame University Press, 2023).
Rebecca Bowen ‘Chapter 25’, in Dante's "Vita Nova": A Collaborative Reading, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski, Heather Webb (Notre Dame University Press, 2023).
Rebecca Bowen (70%) and Alessandro Zammataro (30%) (2023) ‘Ero e Leandro: mitologia e temi lirici in una postilla al Purgatorio XXVIII (v. 73) nel ms. Urb. Lat. 366’, Filologia Antica e Moderna, 5.1: 47–78.
Rebecca Bowen, ‘Languages of Desire in Botticelli and Dante: Paradiso 21’, in Desire, ed. by Hayley O'Kell and Alma Prelec (= MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 16 (2022)), 10–18. https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/wph-16
Curated Exhibitions
'Looking for Dante: Exploring the Divine Comedy in Print from the 15th Century to Today' - Exhibition of New Artworks, Taylor Institute, University of Oxford, June 2024. https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/taylorian/2024/07/24/looking-for-dante-exploring-the-divine-comedy-in-print-from-the-15th-century-to-today/
‘In the Margins’ - Rare Book Display, Taylor Institute, University of Oxford, June 2018.
‘Dante and Somerville’ - Special Collections Exhibition, Somerville College, University of Oxford, November 2018.
Podcasts
History Extra podcast, ‘The Decameron: sex, plague, and a medieval Love Island’, 26/06/2024. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-decameron-sex-plague-and-a-medieval-love-island/id256580326?i=1000663337160