Victoria E. Kirkham

Prof. Kirkham’s interests include Italian literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Catholic Reformation, and Seicento, interdisciplinary relations between literary and visual traditions, numerology in literature, women’s writing, and cinema. She is the co-author of Diana’s Hunt, Caccia di Diana: Boccaccio’s First Fiction (1991); the author of The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction (1993); and Fabulous Vernacular: Boccaccio’s Filocolo and the Art of Medieval Fiction, which won the Modern Language Association of America’s Scaglione Publication Award for best Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies for 2000. She is editor of Laura Battiferra and Her Literary Circle: An Anthology (2006); and co-editor of Boccaccio 1990: The Poet and his Renaissance Reception (1992); Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy (2005); Francesco Petrarca: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (2009); Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (2013); The Decameron: First Day in Perspective (with Kristina Olson, forthcoming). A former Fulbright Scholar, she has received fellowships from the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, National Endowment for the Humanities, Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Guggenheim. Twice past president of the American Boccaccio Association, she has held residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio and the Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities at Bogliasco. Her current research involves the iconography of Dante and work on her book, Christian Courtiers: The Marriage of Laura Battiferra and Bartolomeo Ammannati.