Research
I work on medieval Italian literature, with a focus on history and religion in Dante's Commedia. My interests also include other medieval and early modern writers (Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Cervantes), as well as lasting influence of these writers and their texts.
The Church in Crisis in Dante's Commedia
My first book project examines the ways in which Dante tells the parallel histories of religious institutions in the Divine Comedy. At the intersection of poetry, politics, history, and religion, this study is the first comprehensive study of Dante as a historian of the Church and theorist of its institutions.
Dante, Urban Thinker
I am also working on a project that considers real estate, urban topography, and familial nepotism in the late 13th century. I investigate how Dante’s economic and political concerns about nobility, property, and wealth can be historicized through an analysis of the built environment of Italian cities that the poet references throughout his writing. Recent articles in Dante Studies and MLN make up part of this new direction of my scholarship.
Old Texts, New Questions: Critical Approaches to Medieval Italian Literature
With Alberto Gelmi and Akash Kumar, I am the co-organizer and co-editor of an MLA Working Group (New Orleans, 2025) that brings together scholars working on medieval texts in innovative ways. The results of this working group were published as a special cluster in MLN: Italian Issue in 2026.
Boccaccio and Mediterranean Studies
I have worked on the Mediterranean in medieval Italian literature, such as my 2024 presentation at the Renaissance Society of America on Boccaccio and the island of Cyprus, a version of which is forthcoming in Annali d'italianistica in 2027
Global Reception of Medieval Italian Literature
My interests also include the ways the texts and authors of the Italian middle ages show up in other linguistic contexts, ranging from how Miguel de Cervantes is influenced by the Tre Corone, to Petrarch's reappearance in colonial Mexico, to the contemporary poet Shane McCrae's use of Dante. My chapter on Nicolás Medina Mora's América del Norte and Dante is forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Dante (ed. Elizabeth Coggeshall & Alyssa Granacki).
Other Dante-related work
With Akash Kumar, I am the co-editor of the Dante Simile Project, a collaborative project that seeks to historicize the similes of Dante's Commedia in their multicultural and Mediterranean contexts. I wrote the first chapter of the new Routledge volume, Dante's Paradiso: A Reader's Guide (ed. Filippo Gianferrari & Ronald Herzman). I also co-organized with Natale Vacalebre and Cosette Bruhns Alonso the 2026 Annual Symposium of the Dante Society of America at the Biblioteca Nacional de México in Mexico City.