Hunter College

Faculty Member, Romance Languages and Literatures

Other Affiliations: Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Comparative Literature

Associate Professor

Hunter College

About

Monica Calabritto received her “Laurea” degree in Classics at the Università degli Studi di Pisa and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, with a specialization in Renaissance Studies, from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on the interaction between medicine and literature and between medicine and law in early modern Italy and Europe, as well as on the relation between visual and verbal media in early modern European culture.

Presently, she is working on a book which is  the result of archival research performed in good part during a year spent in Italy with a I Tatti Fellowship (2004-2005) from the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. Her study focuses on the analysis and interpretation of the tensions between legal theory and practice and among legal, medical and social perspectives vis-à-vis the notion of insanity.


She co-edited with Peter Daly a collection of essays, forthcoming with Droz  (2012), on emblems and imprese of death produced in Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century.

She is the author of the introduction to the first modern English translation, by John Crayton and Daniela Pastina, of Tomaso Garzoni’s The Hospital of Incurable Madness (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2009) and of numerous essays and articles on Garzoni, imprese, gendered madness, melancholy, the relationship between literature and medicine in literary and medical texts, and the structure and function of various medical genres vis-à-vis the illness of melancholy in the early modern period.

She is the director of the Italian Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY.