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Please join us for the upcoming Italian Lecture Series talk entitled "Gender and Reading. The Example of Francesca da Rimini and a Medievalist’s Perspective" by (University of Oxford), hosted by the Department of French and Italian.

Abstract
The encounter of gender and reading evokes several intriguing questions. Dante’s Francesca da Rimini (Inferno, canto 5), a powerful female reader inscribed at the very beginning of the Comedy, helps address some questions and posits many more.  This seminar explores the historical, intellectual, material, and poetic circumstances of medieval female reading and, through the analysis of Francesca’s reading of a passage from the French romance of Lancelot, shows its disruptive, creative, and performative power.

Bio
Elena Lombardi graduated from the University of Pavia (Italy) and received her Ph.D. at NYU. She worked at McGill University in Canada and the University of Bristol in the UK, and is now Professor of Italian Literature at Oxford, and the Paget Toynbee Fellow and Tutor in Medieval Studies at Balliol College. She is the author of five books: The Syntax of Desire. Language and Love in Augustine, the Modistae, Dante (Toronto UP, 2007), The Wings of the Doves. Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture (McGill UP, 2012), Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante (Oxford UP, 2018), Beatrice e le altre. Dante e l’universo femminile (Roma-LaRepubblica, 2021), and Dante’s Ulisse and Other Stories (ICI Press, 2023). She has written several articles on medieval and early modern topics and is one of the co-editors of the recent Oxford Handbook of Dante (Oxford UP, 2021).