Writing is at the heart of my scholarly and creative life. Whether I am reconstructing historical worlds, interpreting texts and images, exploring the lives and ideas of individuals from the past, or imagining characters and realities of my own, I am drawn to writing as a means of thinking and discovering: a way of entering other worlds and perspectives and of exploring questions about human experience, meaning, and possibility. My work spans scholarly non-fiction, fiction, essays, and other forms of storytelling, but across genres, I am interested in the relationship between the particular and the universal, and in the capacity of words and stories to illuminate how human beings perceive, imagine, create, struggle, connect, and become.
Books
Scholarly Non-Fiction
Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy: Devotional Literature and the Spiritual Life in the Long Sixteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2026) [forthcoming]
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)]
Between Gods & Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity (in progress)
Between Gods & Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity is a transhistorical and transcultural study through literature, philosophy, science, and the arts of the conceptual entanglement of humans, gods, and beasts and of humanity’s creation of and engagement with technology from classical antiquity to the present. In the West, humanity (humanitas) has often been defined in relation to divinity (divinitas) and to animality understood as ferity (feritas), a base condition which education helped one to overcome. Looking both backward and forward from this conjunction, the book explores historical and contemporary narratives about human nature, potential, and creativity, and the forces and practices believed to cultivate or corrupt them.
Michelangelo and the Knowing Self (in progress)
A complex figure inhabiting a complicated historical moment, Michelangelo was many things: a creator of visionary religious art in a time of spiritual tumult and devotional change; a practitioner of human dissection in a society that believed anatomization had spiritual implications for both practitioner and society; a religious man beset by homoerotic yearnings in an age of apocalyptic fervor; a love poet whose wayfaring speaker expressed the desire for both carnal satisfaction and divine union. Throughout his life and career, Michelangelo studied knowing subjects from physiological and psychological perspectives, himself included. A study of consciousness, or the knowing self, and its representations in Michelangelo, this book examines that project. Exploring Michelangelo’s textual and visual production through the prism of a specifically Christian phenomenology, this study examines his understanding of the self and its relations to the world, other human beings, and the divine.
Fiction
A story about power, connection, and what it means to truly see and be seen, Imminence tells the tale of Dianora, a twenty-year-old woman with visionary skills 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.
Articles and Essays
“Phenomenology of Revelation: Faith, Truth, and the Darkness of God in Sixteenth-Century Italy.” Religions 16, 1486 (2025): 1-29.
In his poetry, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) explored the eye from both a physiological and a psychological perspective. This essay demonstrates that for him the organs of vision constituted a gateway to the intellect-soul, the eyes were a means by which lover and beloved, beholder and beheld touched, and the mind was their place of encounter and negotiation. Analyzing descriptions of the eye and the gaze in Michelangelo’s verse and elucidating the roots of his phenomenology of love in theories of Platonic intromission, Galenic-Mondinian anatomy, and Aristotelian-Avicennian psychology, this essay reveals that he subscribed to a non-dualist, non-materialist worldview and understood humans as divinely created entities dependent upon the immaterial ground of their being.
In early modern Italy, lyric poets of spiritual verse experimented with engaging and depicting the divine Word in novel ways. They aestheticized bodies, including that of Christ, and they imagined eroticized encounters between themselves and the Word made flesh. This article examines the sensual spiritual poetry of three early modern Italian women who, between 1530 and 1630, dedicated themselves to crafting and reinvigorating the poetic word and to expressing and (re)presenting the divine Word. Exploring the introspective and subjective spiritual lyrics of Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), Laura Battiferri (1523–1589), and Francesca Turini Bufalini (1553–1641) in the context of the Italian literary Renaissance and Counter-Reformation, it aims to highlight and to elucidate the conflation of the sacred and the erotic in their verse. In so doing, this article reveals how these early modern female poets deployed the sensual strategically in their verse to elevate the erotic, and how they raised the Italian religious lyric to new literary heights by spiritualizing the dominant poetic idiom.
This study aims to elucidate Michelangelo’s engagement with the divine Word in the age of religious reform through an analysis of the spiritual verses and the verbal and visual sketches and related sculptural works that Michelangelo produced in the first three decades of the sixteenth century. It begins with an examination of Michelangelo’s earliest autograph folios and the ways in which religious text and image commingle in enigmatic juxtapositions on the sheets that testify to his first experiments with verse and the importance he attached to the Bible and to prayer. Through an analysis of sonnets “S’un casto amor, s’una pietà superna” and “Vorrei voler, Signor, quel ch’io non voglio,” this article examines Michelangelo’s use of the Bible as a literary source and as a devotional instrument, respectively. Demonstrating the poet’s transposition in these sonnets of scriptural discourses from the New Testament, this study reveals Michelangelo’s close reading of the Brucioli Bible in particular.
Il presente contributo si propone di far luce sul modo in cui Michelangelo, nell’età della riforma religiosa, dialogò con le Sacre Scritture mediante un’analisi dei versi spirituali, degli schizzi verbali e visivi e delle relative opere scultoree che realizzò nei primi decenni del Cinquecento. Innanzitutto, si prendono in considerazione i primi fogli autografi di Michelangelo, esaminando le modalità in cui scritti e immagini formano giustapposizioni enigmatiche. Sono fogli che testimoniano dei primi tentativi poetici dell’autore e dell’importanza che questi attribuiva alla Bibbia e alla preghiera. Attraverso un’analisi dei sonetti “S’un casto amor, s’una pietà superna” e “Vorrei voler, Signor, quel ch’io non voglio,” si esamina in seguito come Michelangelo utilizzò la Bibbia, rispettivamente, come fonte letteraria e come strumento di devozione. Rilevando come il poeta, in questi sonetti, trasponga in poesia riprese lessicali provenienti dal Nuovo Testamento, si può anche dimostrare come fosse un attento lettore della Bibbia di Brucioli.
Commencement Address
Commencement Address, June 12, 2022, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Stanford University
Multimedia Project and Newsletter
Convergence: Where Humanistic Inquiry Meets Creative Expression
An initiative dedicated to personal and critical engagement with ideas and cultural forms concerning what it means to be human (in development)
