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. 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 advisory boards of “Ente Nazionale Giovanni Boccaccio” and the Mediterranean Seminar.org.
As in an interview for UCLA CMRS CENTER for Early Global (Studies Roberta Morosini appointed as Professor of European languages and transcultural studies – UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies,) Dr. Morosini’s research interests lie in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Culture and Literature in a pan-Mediterranean perspective, with a sea level approach and a strong belief in the Archipelagic thought, for a geo-philology of the sea. These interests include studies of the Mediterranean, metaliterary and geocritical studies, and spatial and cartographic writings from Dante to Renaissance island books. Part of her pan-Mediterranean research evolves around the study of Christian-Muslim Relations and mis-representations of Muhammad the Prophet of Islam as in her forthcoming book Boccaccio and the Invention of Islam. Writing Otherness and Crossing Faiths in the Mediterranean (De Gruyter).
In her approach to the sea as a network of knowledge and a space of crossings of people as well as stories, she blends scholarship in the visual arts with transcultural investigations of slavery, mobility, and identity“ as in the recent “Transgressing Periphery, Dressing Otherness. Locating Geo-Cultural Spaces of Diversity in the Medieval Mediterranean.” In Cultures of Exchange, eds. S. Barsella. W. Caferro, G. Maifreda, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming.
Among her publications:
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.”