Published Works

Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry, and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) [winner of an MLA ‘best-book’ publication award]

Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe: Contexts, Concepts, and Expressions (Toronto: CRRS, 2014). [co-edited with Amyrose McCue Gill] 

Friulians in Canada (Udine: Forum, 2014) [a commissioned, dual-language study (Italian and English)]

Works in Progress

The Space Between: Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy

This academic monograph considers the ways in which male and female poets of the introspective devotional lyric engaged the Word in text, image, and imagination in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Combining diachronic and synchronic analyses of devotional verse, this study examines the relations between spiritual life and poetic expression in the long sixteenth century through the prism of the threefold Word and the perspective of vernacular theology. This book reveals an incarnational cultural project rooted in an interstitial mode of existence for which Mary, the saints, and the apostles served as models: a condition of being and an experience of relating to self, divine, and world in ‘between spaces’ within and without that reflect the emergence of a new conception of selfhood consistent with the ideals of spiritual autonomy and agency enshrined in the Ignatian fundamentum.

Imminence: Florence, 1494

Imminence tells the tale of Isabella, a twenty-four-year-old woman with visionary skills, an uncommon ally, and close but complicated ties to the ruling Medici family who must act expeditiously to ensure that the Florentine republic does not succumb to three menacingly near threats in the fall of 1494: civil war, tyranny, and invasion by the approaching French king and his army of unprecedented size and destructive power.

You can read more about my novel here.