This annual invited fellowship is sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies, the Italian Studies section of the Department of Romance Languages, and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The recipient spends one week at Penn working on manuscript material from the library’s collections of rare books and manuscripts, offering, in exchange, a graduate-student workshop and a lecture on the research conducted while in residence.
2022–2023: Laura Banella, University of Notre Dame
Laura Banella is an assistant professor in Italian at the University of Notre Dame and a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie in medieval Italian literature. Her research has focused on Dante and Boccaccio and on the books transmitting their works (13th-16th century). She has also worked on reception, the history of literary criticism, Renaissance literature, and the female auctor. Her recent publications include La ‘Vita nuova’ del Boccaccio. Fortuna e tradizione (Rome-Padua: Antenore, 2017) and Rime e libri delle rime di Dante tra Medioevo e primo Rinascimento (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2020).
Lecture: Dante vs Dante: Material Traditions of the Lyric and the Construction of Poetic Authority, held in-person and online, Thursday, March 16, 2023, 5:15PM, Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. Register here.
2020–2021: (postponed to 2021-2022) Bryan C. Keene, Riverside City College
Bryan C. Keene teaches art history at Riverside City College. Previously, he was a curator in the Department of Manuscripts at Getty Museum, where he began his career in the arts as an educator. He holds a PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London and his edited volume, “Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts,” is available from Getty Publications (2019).
Lecture: Masters in Miniature: Future Horizons for Italian Manuscript Studies, held online, Friday, February 11, 2022, 1:00PM EST. Recording available here.
2019–2020: Maddalena Signorini, University of Rome Tor Vergata
Maddalena Signorini is professor of Latin Paleography and Codicology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy. Her research focuses on medieval literacy, on the first writing in Romance vernaculars, and in more recent years, on Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s handwriting, books, and libraries. During her fellowship, she will examine a selection of fifteenth-century Italian manuscripts with the aim of setting them in the broader context of Italian book production.
Lecture: Texts on Flyleaves. An Investigation on Petrarch’s Writing Uses, held Thursday, February 27, 2020, 5:15PM, Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. Available to view here.
2018–2019: Rhiannon Daniels, University of Bristol
Rhiannon Daniels is Senior Lecturer in Italian in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol in England. Her research focuses on medieval and Renaissance culture, reception studies, and the history of the book, with a focus on finding ways of using the material form of manuscripts and printed books to (re)construct histories of reading and book production techniques. During her fellowship, she will be examining manuscript rubrics and annotations in Renaissance copies of Boccaccio’s Decameron.
Lecture: Writing and Reading Rubrics in the Renaissance Decameron, held Thursday, January 24, 2019, 5:00PM, Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. For more information, go to http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/decameron.html.
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 