Recipients of Ahmanson Research Fellowships for the Study of Medieval and Renaissance Books and Manuscripts

2020-21

Kate Driscoll (PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 2020) specializes in late medieval and early modern Italy and Europe. Her research interests include the relationship between literature and politics, issues of gender and women’s studies, musicology, and the transmission of culture. Her current book project, Tasso among the Muses: Reading and Writing Women in Early Modern Italy, studies how Tasso’s socialized literary production—his letters, lyric poetry, dialogues, and epics about mobility and hospitality—reflects the various communities with which he interacted, and which fostered participation by women writers, performers, and patrons. The arguments advanced in this study reveal how Tasso’s multifaceted connections with women shaped the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century expansion of cultural networks—literary, musical, theatrical, and scientific—in which opportunities for women and men to collaborate as intellectual protagonists increased due to developments in the notion of collective identity. Her research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Renaissance Society of America. In addition to her research fellowship at UCLA, she is a postdoctoral fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (2020–2021), through the Cluster of Excellence program “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective.”

Eric Dursteler (PhD, Brown, 2000) is Professor of History at Brigham Young University. His research focuses on the entangled history of the early modern Mediterranean, in particular gender, language, food and identity.  His publications include Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2006), Renegade Women: Gender, Identity and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2011), and The Mediterranean World: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Napoleon (2016). He is currently completing a book on food and foodways in the Mediterranean. His work has been supported by, among others, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. He is the editor of the News on the Rialto. During his time in the UCLA Library Special Collections he plans to read broadly in the collections of Mediterranean travel narratives looking for elusive references to women and language. He will also examine correspondence in the Orsini and Bourbon del Monte de San Faustino family papers to investigate women from these families to see the degree to which they may have participated in the multilingual Republic of Letters.

Kristen Keach is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. She holds a B.A. in Art History and Italian Studies from USC, magna cum laude, an M.A. in Art History from UC Davis where her thesis discussed the encoded homosexual dialogue between Robert Rauschenberg’s Inferno series and Jasper Johns’ Targets, and an M.A. in Italian Studies from UC Berkeley. Her research interests include ekphrasis, intertextuality, intervisuality, and intermediality. She was a Mellon Institute in Italian Paleography Fellow at the Newberry Library (2019) and recently received the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation grant for research toward her dissertation, titled The Italian Poetic Triumvirate Realized: Visualizing the ‘Trionfi’ or the ‘tre corone’ which explores the relationship between Dante’s Commedia, Boccaccio’s L’Amorosa visione, and Petrarca’s Trionfi. Through intertextuality, intervisuality, and intermediality, her project exposes the shared triumphal dialogue among the poetics of the tre corone that informs the iconography for the later artistic visualizations of the Trionfi. Rather than strictly adhering to Petrarch’s text for inspiration, the images unveil a Trionfi of the tre corone.

Stacie Vos, a native of Michigan, is a PhD Candidate in Literature at UC San Diego and a Lecturer at University of San Diego. Before beginning her doctoral work, she completed Teach for America, earned a Master of Arts in Teaching at Smith College, and a Master of Divinity degree at Yale University. She taught community college English and Humanities courses for several years in Connecticut. A fiction writer since childhood, she recently published her short stories in the journal Effects. She is also a contributor to the Oxford DNB, and has received research fellowships from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library and the Huntington Library. She is currently writing a dissertation called Englishing the Virgin: Marian Devotion and the Making of English Prose Style.

2019-20

Emily Mayne, PhD, Research Associate, University of East Anglia
Dimitra Vogiatzaki, PhD candidate, Harvard University

2018-19

Nicholas Fenech, PhD candidate, Stanford University
Laura Godfrey, PhD candidate, University of Connecticut
Katherine McKenna, Graduate Student, Vanderbilt University
Andrea Ottone, PhD, Università degli Studi de Udine
Robin Reich, PhD candidate, Columbia University
Selene Vatteroni, PhD, Freie Universität Berlin

2017-18

Caitlin Koford, PhD candidate, Medieval History, UC Santa Barbara
Zoe Langer, PhD candidate, Italian Studies, Brown University
Sara Taglialagamba, PhD, Assistant Professor, Architecture, Politecnico di Milano

2016-17

Thalia Allington-Wood, PhD candidate, History of Art, University College London
Brian Anthony Brege, PhD, Lecturer, History, Stanford University
Kersti Francis, Graduate student, English, UCLA
Rebecca Hill, Graduate student, English, UCLA
Anna Klosowska, PhD, Professor, French and Italian, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

2015-16

Janna Israel, PhD, Assistant Professor of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University
Orietta Filippini, PhD, Erfurt Universität, Gotha Research Centre
Melissa Swain, PhD candidate, Italian Studies, New York University

2014-15

Danielle Callegari, PhD candidate, New York University
Sebastian Derks, PhD candidate and Researcher, Huygens Institute
Jill Pedersen, PhD, Assistant Professor of Art History, Arcadia University

2013-14

Eduard Vilella, PhD, Lecturer, Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, UAB, Barcelona
Lorenza Iannacci, PhD, Postdoctoral fellowship at University of Bologna
Sara Torres, PhD candidate, English, UCLA
Angela Nuovo, PhD, Associate Professor, Humanistic Studies, University of Udine

2012-13

Christiana Purdy Moudarres, PhD, Italian Language and Literature, Yale University
Jane Raisch, Graduate student, Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley
Pippa Salonius, PhD, Art History, University of Warwick