Luca Zipoli

Pronouns: he/him · lui/tu

A native of Rome (Italy), Luca Zipoli was trained at the distinguished Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he attended both the undergraduate and the graduate program. Prior to joining Bryn Mawr, he researched and taught as a Visiting Scholar at Princeton and at New York University, and had the opportunity to improve his Italian education through a full interaction with world-class international universities.

His main area of specialization is the literary culture of late medieval and early modern Italy, which he addresses in a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, privileging the intersections of fields such as history and visual arts, comparative literature and trans-medial studies, book history, and gender studies. The relationships between historical events, religious beliefs, and literary culture in Renaissance Florence are the main concern of his book-length project, titled Around The Magnificent: Poetry, Magic and Religion in Early Modern Florence, which he is currently developing from his Ph.D. dissertation.

His field of scholarly interest also includes the relationships between literature and the figurative arts, and in particular the trans-historical legacies of early modern chivalric epics into modern global arts and media (Alberto Savinio, Giorgio Manganelli, and Alfredo Giuliani among others). He has also researched and published on Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature, with a specific focus on Umberto Saba, Primo Levi, and more generally on how the theme of otherness (gender & sexuality, race & ethnicity, religion) emerges within the 20th-century Italian poetic tradition.

Selected publications:

(forthcoming) “Il mondo così com’è: Luigi Pulci visto da Alberto Savinio”, in In Principio era Pulci, edited by Gabriele Bucchi (Pisa, ETS, 2023)

(forthcoming) “Pulci, Luigi”, in Enciclopedia dell’Umanesimo e del Rinascimento (Florence, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 2023)

“L’enigma del saltimbanco: Giorgio Manganelli lettore di Luigi Pulci”, Italianistica, 51:3 (2022): 33-50

“Translation as Transformation: Gender and Religion in Antonia Pulci’s Rappresentazione di Santa Domitilla (1483)”, in Women and Translation in the Italian Tradition. From the Renaissance to the Present, ed. by Helena Sanson (Paris, Garnier, 2022): 55-73

“Amos Chiabov e la poesia «Morte di un pettirosso» di Umberto Saba”, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore. Classe di Lettere, 14:1 (2022): 407-435

“«A lei scrivo volentieri». Lettere di Umberto Saba ad Amos Chiabov”, Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 199.665 (2022): 27-78

“«Strinsi col dolore un patto»: Saba e il racconto della malattia tra Canzoniere e lettere”, in Letteratura e Scienze, ed. by Alberto Casadei, Francesca Fedi, Annalisa Nacinovich, Andrea Torre (Rome, Adi editore, 2021): 1-14

“«In lieto aspetto il bel giardin s’aperse»: il giardino di Armida nelle edizioni illustrate della Gerusalemme liberata dal Cinque al Settecento”, in Parola all’immagine. Esperienze dell’ecfrasi da Petrarca a Marino ed. by Andrea Torre (Lucca, Maria Pacini Fazzi, 2019): 103-121

“Da «comedìa» a «tragedìa»: lingua e stile del secondo Morgante”, in Luigi Pulci, la Firenze laurenziana e il Morgante, ed. by Maria Cristina Cabani (Modena, Accademia Nazionale di Scienze Lettere e Arti, 2019): 113-138