Joseph Pivato is editor and contributor to the book, Africadian Atlantic: Essays on George Elliott Clarke. Guernica Editions, 2012.

Clarke's 2001 play and opera, Beatrice Chancy is an adaptation of the Cenci family tragedy of murder and execution from 1590s Rome. Clarke's work has been published in Italian, Poesie e Drammi. trans Giulio Marra, Università di Venezia, 2012. Clarke is a frequent invited speaker, reader and performer in Italy.

Congratulations to Prof. Konrad Eisenbichler on being awarded an Honourable Mention for the prestigious Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize of the Modern Language Association of America. The prize was awarded for his book The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). The committee’s citation for the honorable mention reads:

Konrad Eisenbichler’s lucid, elegant, and original volume brings to light the virtually unknown writings and lives of a circle of sixteenth-century Sienese women poets. This intriguing historical study, commentary, and anthology will be a precious contribution to the history of Italian lyric and religious poetry in the early modern period, to women’s studies, and to Renaissance studies. Eminently readable, “The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena” is the product of extensive archival work that engages broadly with existing scholarship in literary history and criticism, providing the reader with all the descriptive and analytic information necessary for an understanding of the biographies of the Sienese poets and a measured evaluation of their poems, including an appreciation of their contrasting styles and aesthetic orientations.

Professor Olga Pugliese has recently published three works. The first is an on-line book-length study: Transcription of the Early Extant Manuscripts of Baldassar Castiglione’s “Il libro del cortegiano," posted on the University of Toronto Library T-space on 30 June 2012. It is 784 pages long and was prepared with the assistance of Lorenzo Bartoli, Filomena Calabrese, Adriana Grimaldi, Ian Martin, Laura Prelipcean, and Antonio Ricci. The web address is: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/32401.

The other two works are print, and both are articles:

“Unity and Multiplicity: Castiglione’s Views on Architecture in the Cortegiano.” Mitteilungen des Kunst-historischen Institutes in Florenz, 54. 2 (2010-2012): 257-266.

“Sensorial Language in Machiavelli’s Il principe” in “sul fil di ragno della memoria”. Studi in onore di Ilona Fried, ed. Franciska d’Elhoungne Hervai and Dávid Falvay. Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University and Ponte Foundation, 2012, pp. 81-92.

Filomena Calabrese has completed her PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Toronto and is now happily settled into her new position as Lecturer of Italian in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at Christopher Newport University (Virginia). She is teaching Italian language and culture, as well as a course on medieval and Renaissance perspectives that is part of the university’s recently launched Medieval and Renaissance Studies minor program.

Konrad Eisenbichler has just published The Sword and the Pen: Women, Poetry and Politics in Sixteenth-Century Siena. The book, published by the University of Notre Dame Press (2012), is the fruit of more than fifteen years of research in the archives and libraries of Italy in search of these long-lost writers who were well known in their time but failed to enter the canon of Italian literature and so, over time, disappeared from the radar. The book thus brings back into circulation not only these women’s poetry, but also much rich information about their lives and their contribution to contemporary letters and politics.