Roberta Cauchi Santoro has successfully defended her dissertation entitled “Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett.” She will be awarded with the degree PhD in Comparative Literature at the June 2013 Convocation ceremony at the University of Western Ontario. On July 1st 2013 Roberta will start a postdoctoral fellowship within the University of Guelph's European Studies Program.

In her dissertation, Roberta questions critical approaches that argue for Giacomo Leopardi’s and Samuel Beckett’s pessimism and nihilism. Beckett quotes Leopardi when discussing the removal of desire in his monograph Proust, a context that has spurred pessimist and nihilist readings. She argues that the inappropriateness of these labels is, on the contrary, specifically exposed through the role of desire in the two thinkers. Looking at Leopardi’s later poetry in the ciclo d’Aspasia, including the last poem “La Ginestra, o il fiore del deserto,” and examining Beckett’s  plays Endgame and Happy Days, she argues that desire in Leopardi and Beckett could be read as lying at the cusp between Jacques Lacan’s and Emmanuel Levinas’ theories, a desire that both splits the subject (and is thus based on lack) as much as it moulds the subject when called to address the Other (inspiring what Levinas terms ‘infinity’ as opposed to ‘totality,’ an infinity pitted against the nothingness crucial to pessimist and nihilist readings).

Violetta Sutton (Topoleva) has completed all of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. In March she successfully defended her dissertation Society, Language, and Carnival in the Comedies of Ludovico Ariosto and will be awarded with the degree at the convocation ceremony, on June 5, 2013.

For her doctoral dissertation, she examined Ariosto’s comedies focusing not only on their structure, content, language and their reception and influences throughout the centuries, but also on social-historic context in which Ariosto’s comedies were composed, staged, and printed. While applying the theory of carnival in the comprehensive analysis of Ariosto’s comedies, she outlined Ariosto’s innovations made in his comedies. She plans to examine Ariosto’s comedies furthermore and eventually publish her research.

Professor Konrad Eisenbichler’s book The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena is one of the finalists in the ForeWord 2012 Book of the Year Award. ForeWord Reviews, a quarterly print journal dedicated to reviewing independently published books, was established in 1998 to provide booksellers, librarians, agents, and publishing professionals with reviews of the best titles from small, alternative, and academic presses. This year’s finalists were selected from more than 1300 titles submitted for the awards. The winners in the various categories will be announced on 28 June at the American Library Association annual conference in Chicago.

Teresa G. Russo edited Recognition and Modes of Knowledge: Anagnorisis from Antiquity to Contemporary Theory (2013) with University Alberta Press. The volume focuses on Aristotle's theory of Anagnorisis, or recognition, and traces the theory through various historical periods and disciplines. To date, no one has attempted a comprehensive discussion of recognition across disciplines, places, and historical periods. Recognition and Modes of Knowledge is the culmination of an interdisciplinary conference on recognition with contributions from international authorities including Rachel Adelman, Piero Boitani, Harry Fox (leBeit Yoreh), Rhiannon Graybill, Roland Le Huenen, Rosa Mucignat, Joseph Ring, Teresa G. Russo, Jenna Sunkenberg, Christina Tarnopolsky, Kevin Frederick Vaughan, Jeffrey Neil Weiner, and Naomi A. Weiss.

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.