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

Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy

This academic monograph considers the ways in which male and female poets of devotional verse engaged the Word in text, image, and imagination in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Combining diachronic and synchronic approaches to the study of early modern Italian verse, this study examines relations among religious practices and poetic form in the pre-Tridentine and post-Tridentine periods through an analysis of religious images, ekphrastic verse, and the manifold relations and interrelations between art and devotion in Italy and in the early modern world. Attending to spiritual poetry in the subjective mode and to the various connections between religious reading, writing, and identity in the medieval and early modern periods, Poetics of Piety analyzes verse inspired by scripture, by Christocentric piety, and by the evolving contemplative tradition.

Imminence: A Novel

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.