French & Italian

Simone Marchesi (M.A. University of Notre Dame, Italian Studies; Ph.D. Princeton University, Comparative Literature) is Associate Professor of French and Italian. His special interest is in the influence of classical and late-antique Latin works on Italian medieval writers, especially Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Published work includes Stratigrafie decameroniane (Olschki, 2004), Traccia fantasma. Testi e contesti per le canzoni dei Virginiana Miller (Erasmo, 2005), Un’America, an edition and translation into Italian of Robert Pinsky’s 1979 long poem An Explanation of America, and several articles on Italy ’s Three Crowns, as well as on the tradition of the twentieth-century novel and contemporary Italian cinema. A monograph on Dante’s evolving idea of poetry from Vita Nuova to the meta-poetic statements of the Commedia, in the light of Saint Augustine ’s linguistics, poetics, and hermeneutics is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press.

Simone Marchesi teaches both language and literature courses on medieval Italian authors (Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio). His specialty remains Dante’s Divine Comedy, which he has taught both in Italian and in English, as an advanced seminar in the Department as well as a Freshmen Seminar. 

In addition to the edition and translation into Italian of Robert Hollander’s commentary to Dante’s Commedia (scheduled to be released by Olschki in 2011), Simone Marchesi is working on a project on the rise of European medieval fiction and the ‘analytical turn’ of Scholastic philosophy between the twelfth and the fourteenth century.