Francesco Marco Aresu earned his Ph.D. in Italian literature (with a secondary field in Classical Philology) from Harvard University. He graduated in Letters from the Università degli Studi di Cagliari in Sardinia, and has Masters from Stanford University and Indiana University.
His areas of expertise are Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, manuscript studies and history of the book, medieval and humanistic philology, Sardinian literature, textual criticism, and literary theory.
He has published on Dante’s intertextuality, the first illustrated incunable of Dante’s Commedia, Italian metrics and metricology, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Petrarca’s sestinas, Baroque theater, Folengo’s metatextuality, Alberti’s early works, and figuralism in literature. He edited and translated eighteenth-century Latin hymns for the Centro di studi filologici sardi. He is editor for the Petrarchive and associate editor for Heliotropia. His first book, Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature, came out in 2023 with the University of Notre Dame Press.
Before joining the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he taught Italian and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University.
Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
M.A. in Italian, Stanford University
M.A. in Italian Studies, Indiana University (Bloomington)
B.A. in Letters, Università degli studi di Cagliari
- Italian Language and Literature
- Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio
- Medieval and Renaissance Literature
- Manuscript Studies and History of the Book
- Medieval and Humanistic Philology
- Literary Theory and Criticism
- Textual Criticism
- Sardinian Literature
Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming in 2023)
“A Dantean (and Alfierian?) Incunable in the Olin Library at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT).” In B. Arduini, I. Magni, and J. Todorović (eds.), Interpretation and Visual Poetics in Medieval and Early Modern Texts (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2021), 147-162
“Intertestualità dantesche: un’allusione a Ennio?” Romanic Review 112, no. 1 (2021): 85-96
“Un manoscritto del Teseida conservato a Philadelphia e un nuovo frammento del cantare della Guerra di Troia.” Medioevo letterario d’Italia 15 (2018 [2019]): 141-153 (with M. Cursi, Università degli studi di Napoli ‘Federico II’)
“Antonio Da Tempo and Gidino da Sommacampagna.” In P. E. Szarmach (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Medieval Studies (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2019)
“Visual Discourse in Petrarch’s Sestinas.” Mediaevalia 39 (2018): 185-215
“La centaura di Giovan Battista Andreini tra teatro e teoria.” In F. Fantuzzi (ed.), Tales of Unfulfilled Times: Saggi in onore di Dario Calimani da parte dei suoi allievi (Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2017), 8-30
“A New Manuscript of Leon Battista Alberti’s Early Works: Cambridge (Mass.), Houghton Library, Typ 1086.” Studi di erudizione e di filologia italiana 4 (2015): 31-39 (with M. Romani Mistretta, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)
“Pratiche metatestuali nel Baldus.” In M. Scalabrini (ed.), Folengo in America (Padua: Longo, 2012), 97-119
“Figura.” In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 2012), 485-486 (with D. Marno, UC Berkeley)
“Modalità iconica e istanza metatestuale nella sestina petrarchesca: “Mia benigna fortuna e ’l viver lieto” (Rvf CCCXXXII).” Textual Cultures 5, no. 2 (2010): 11-25