Simone Marchesi (Laurea, University of Pisa; M.A. University of Notre Dame, Italian Studies; Ph.D. Princeton University, Comparative Literature) is Professor of French and Italian.

His main research area is the dialogue with classical and late-antique texts engaged by medieval Italian writers, especially Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

Published work on medieval authors includes two monographs: Stratigrafie decameroniane (Olschki, 2004), Dante and Augustine: Linguistics, Poetics, Hermeneutics (UToronto Press, 2011), along with articles and chapters in collections. Recently, he has co-edited three collections of essays on Dante and Boccaccio: Dante Alive (Routledge, 2022); Decameron Day IX in Perspective (UToronto Press, 2022); and Boccaccio Today: Documenting, Interpreting, Responding, for the journal Letteratura Tardogotica e Quattrocentesca (2022-2023).

Vernacular Edens, a monograph on the literary motif of the garden visit, constructed by late-medieval vernacular fiction writers as a trope for their acts of cultural translation, is forthcoming with the University of Toronto Press.

At the national level, he has served as Vice-President and President of the American Boccaccio Association, as well as Editor in Chief for the Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America, now DanteNotes.

Simone Marchesi regularly teaches both language and literature courses on medieval Italian authors (Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio). His specialty remains Dante’s Divine Comedy, which he has taught both in Italian and in English, as an advanced seminar in the Department as well as a first-year seminar. For the Freshman Seminar Program, he has also developed two comparative-literature classes on western literary teratology and eschatology, entitled “Monsters Among Us” and “Other Hells,” respectively. 

Current Projects

Publications