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 has taught Italian literature at Oxford with a focus on Dante and medieval lyric since 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, including questions of classical reception and the intermedial relations. Her specialisms include the works of Dante and Boccaccio, Iconology, Text/Image Studies, and History of the Book.

Teaching Specialisms

Dante - Paper IX

Italian Medieval Poetry - Paper VI

Italian Lyric Poetry - Paper III

Selected Publications

Rebecca Bowen, ‘Occhi Fissi’: Fixing the Gaze in Dante’s Commedia’, Italian Studies, 78:1, 1–18, DOI: 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 and Alessandro Zammataro, ‘Ero e Leandro: mitologia e temi lirici in una postilla al Purgatorio XXVIII (v. 73) nel ms. Urb. Lat. 366’, Filologia Antica e Moderna (2023).

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

‘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