Roberta Morosini
PROFESSOR
Prior to joining UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies in July 2024, Professor Morosini was Professor of Italian at the Università L’Orientale di Napoli since 2022 and the 2024 Chair of Italian Culture at UC Berkeley.
She has been Professor of Romance Languages at Wake Forest University and the 2019-2020 Charles Speroni Endowed Chair at UCLA. She has a Ph.D. from McGill University in Italian Literature, with a specialization in Italian Medieval Literature and Culture. She also has an Italian Laurea in European Languages and Literatures from the University “Federico II” of Naples and a French D.E.A. (Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies) in Littératures françaises from the Université de Rennes II, as well as a Diploma from the School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University. She has studied Dante and linguistics at the University of Reading, UK. A recipient of the Luigi De Lise Culture Award, Dr. Morosini has been a Fellow at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, at the NEH Mediterranean Summer Institute, at the Bogliasco Foundation, and at the Cini Foundation’s Centro Studi di Civiltà Italiana Vittore Branca, and she was awarded the 2025-2026 Ragusa Foundation Fellowship.
She has served twice as Vice President of the American Boccaccio Association and once as President of the executive committee of the Division of Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature of the MLA. She is currently on the scientific committee of the Fondazione Ente Nazionale Giovanni Boccaccio, which recently nominated her Honorary Member and member of the Mediterranean Seminar.org.
Dr. Roberta Morosini’s research focuses on Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature from a pan-Mediterranean perspective, informed by geocritical and archipelagic approaches. Her concept of the Geo-Philology of the Sea brings geography, cartography, and philology into dialogue to examine, through texts and images, how maritime space shapes literary imagination, mobility, and interconnections across the Mediterranean, as in Il mare salato. Il Mediterraneo di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio (Viella, 2020), a finalist for the MARetica Literary Prize (2021).
Her scholarship also investigates Dante’s engagement with Islam and the interactions between Christian and Muslim intellectual traditions, most recently in Dante, Moses and the Book of Islam: Visualizing the Qur’an and Filippino Lippi’s Adoration of the Golden Calf (2024).
She has also written extensively on the Italian Alexander tradition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, its circulation across the Mediterranean, and the Persian elements of Alexander’s aerial and underwater journeys. Representative publications include “The Alexander Romance in Italy,” https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004211933/Bej.9789004183452.i-410_015.xml (Brill, 2011), “Perché Alexandro cercò molti istrani paesi”: I viaggi di Alessandro e la malattia di Aristotele (2013), and the forthcoming monograph The Italian Alexander Tales (1200–1500): Aristotle, the Ethiopian Candace, and the Mediterranean Crisis of Knowledge (Routledge-Francis&Taylor, 2027).
Her most recent book, Boccaccio’s Orient: Transgressive Mobilities and Identities across Texts and Faiths in the Mediterranean (De Gruyter-Brill, 2026), explores cross-dressing, transgressive identities, and geocritical representations of mobility and space in the medieval Mediterranean.
Forthcoming in 2027, Voci di Partenope, corpi di nostalgia. Dalla sirena a Napolita: Tahar Ben Jelloun e la città come libro d’acqua (Meltemi) centers on the figure of the siren Partenope and her modern reincarnation, Napolita, in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Albergo dei poveri, tracing Naples as a city of memory, migration, and storytelling.
Among her publications:
Boccaccio’s Orient: Transgressive Mobilities and Identities across Texts and Faiths in the Mediterranean (De Gruyter Brill, 2026)
Dante, Moses and the Book of Islam. Visualizing the Qur’an and Filippino Lippi’s Adoration of the Golden calf, Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2024
Il mare salato. Il Mediterraneo di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio, Rome: Viella, 2020 has been a finalist of the literary prize MARetica (2021)
«I cieli naviganti di Napoli». Domenico Rea, Boccaccio e Napoli, Sassari: Mediando, 2023.
Dante, Fra’ Macario e i calzari di Gesù-Francesco a Bosa. L’incontro dei tre vivi e dei tre morti. Sassari: Mediando, 2021.
Rotte di poesia. Rotte di civiltà. Il Mediterraneo degli dei nella Genealogia di Boccaccio e Piero di Cosimo, Rome: Castelvecchi, 2021.
Maria di Francia. Favole. Edition and Translation from Anglo-Normand. Rome: Carocci, 2006.
Dr. Morosini who founded the book series Mediterranean Circularities for L’«Erma» di Bretschneider publisher, is the co-founder and director of the Summer School Leggere Mediterranea in Alghero. The first edition in 2023 was dedicated to “Maps, islands and borders,” and the 2024 to “Archipelagos.”