Prof. Roberta Ricci
Roberta has been teaching a wide variety of courses at Bryn Mawr, from advanced seminars on Dante and psychoanalytic approaches to modernist novels to experimental classes on gendered violence, medieval literature and medical humanities, and the intersection of cinema and literature.
Trained at the University of Pisa and at Johns Hopkins as a philologist, comparatist, and literary historian, she worked on medieval and early modern epic poetry, the problem of authorship, 20th century narrative (Savinio, Gadda, Levi), and the material legacy of humanist Poggio Bracciolini (one of the inventors of what we call modernity). She is currently writing about transcultural exchanges between western Romance cultures and Byzantium, intersecting classicism and orientalism, the metamorphoses of ancient Greek, and the intercultural and multiracial roots of a concept that was appropriated by white suprematists: citizenship.
Prof. Luca Zipoli
Trained at the distinguished Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Luca joined BMC in 2022. His main area of specialization is the literary culture of late medieval and early modern Italy, privileging the intersections of fields such as history and visual arts, comparative literature and trans-medial studies, book history, and gender studies.
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.