A photo of Andrea Moudarres

Andrea Moudarres

Associate Professor

E-mail: moudarres@ucla.edu Office: 340C Royce

Office Hours: Tues, 4:00pm-6:00pm

Fields of interest: Epic, Dante, Humanism, Machiavelli, classical influence in medieval and Renaissance culture

Andrea Moudarres (Ph.D  Yale University 2011) is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include Renaissance epic, Dante, Humanism, Machiavelli and political philosophy, and the presence of classical literature in medieval and early modern culture. He is co-editor of two volumes of collected essays: New Worlds and the Italian Renaissance: Contribution to the History of European Intellectual Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Luigi Pulci in Renaissance Florence and Beyond: New Perspectives on his Poetry and Influence (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017); and a special issue of California Italian Studies titled “The Human Animal Bind,” CIS Vol. 10.1 (2020): https://escholarship.org/uc/ismrg_cisj He has also published articles on Dante, Islam in Quattrocento Humanism, Machiavelli, Antonio Pigafetta, and Tasso.

Professor Moudarres’s book, The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2019), was the recipient of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies and examines the question of violence with regard to both internal and external forms of hostility. Through the investigation of the poetic works of Dante, Luigi Pulci, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso, he argues that enmity reflects the fundamental vulnerability of political power and that in fact all forms of hostility – even those conventionally considered external, as those between Christian and Islamic forces in the Middle Ages and Renaissance – consistently arise from within political or religious entities. Professor Moudarres is currently working on a second book project tentatively titled A Political Monster: The Myth of the Centaur in Medieval and Renaissance Italy.

In 2012-2014, Professor Moudarres was a fellow in the ACLS New Faculty Fellows Program. In Spring 2014 he delivered the keynote address at the Induction and Awards Ceremony of the Alpha Lambda Delta & Phi Eta Sigma Honor Societies at UCLA.

Featured Works

Selected Publications

Articles

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals

  • “A Less Perfect Captain: Reconsidering Goffredo in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata,” Forum Italicum 55.1 (May 2021): 3-20.
  • “Margutte’s Pupils: The Ethics of Laughter in Pulci’s Morgante,” in Jo Ann Cavallo, ed., Teaching the Italian Renaissance Romance Epic (New York: Options for Teaching series, Modern Language Association, 2018), 185-190.
  • “Islam e conflitti ispano-lusitani nella Relazione del primo viaggio attorno al mondo di Antonio Pigafetta,” in Emilia Di Rocco, ed., Storie del grande sud. Per Piero Boitani (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2017), 139-152.
  • “Diomedes’ Silence: Homer, Suetonius, and Dante’s Irony in Inferno 26,” Le tre corone III (2016): 11-24.
  • “On the Threshold of Law: Dictatorship and Exception in Machiavelli and Schmitt,” I Tatti Studies 18:2 (Fall 2015): 349-370.
  • “Beheading the Son: Mohammed and Bertran de Born in Inferno 28,” California Italian Studies 5:1 (2014): 550-565.
  • “The Enemy at Home: Fratricide and Civil Strife in Machiavelli’s Thought,” MLN 129.1 (2014): 22-41.
  • “La Tela di Aracne. Metamorfosi nella Letteratura Europea,” in Piero Boitani and Massimo Fusillo, eds., La Letteratura Europea (Turin: FMR-UTET, 2014), vol. III, pp. 389-409.
  • “Crusade and Conversion: Islam as Schism in Pius II and Nicholas of Cusa,” MLN 128.1 (2013): 40-52.

Courses commonly taught

Graduate Courses

  • Ital 214A: La Divina Commedia
  • Ital 216B: Ariosto and Renaissance Epic                                
  • Ital 298: Metamorphoses and Monstrosity in Italian Literature

Undergraduate Courses

  • Ital 42A: Early Modern Italy
  • Ital 103A: Introduction to Classic Italian Literary and Cultural Studies
  • Ital 110: Dante in English
  • Ital 113: Dante’s Commedia
  • Ital 116A: Italian Renaissance: Renewal of Art and Thought
  • Ital 116B: Power and Imagination in the Renaissance