Laura Ingallinella
Assistant Professor, Department of Italian Studies and the Renaissance Program, Victoria College
Laura Ingallinella is an assistant professor in the Department of Italian Studies, with a cross-appointment in the Renaissance Studies Program at Victoria College. Her research focuses on the intersection of identity politics and literary expression in late medieval and Renaissance Italy.
In particular, she specializes in transregional and cross-linguistic exchanges, with a focus on the processes of transculturation initiated by merchants traveling across Europe and the Mediterranean in the early Renaissance.
Ingallinella has published several peer-reviewed essays relevant to critical philology, premodern translation studies, the reception of Dante’s Divine Comedy, manuscript studies, gender and sexuality, and premodern critical race studies.
She is currently completing her first book, Nations of the Book: Trade, Travel, and Transcultural Literacy in the Early Renaissance (1350-1550), and has started working on her second project, tentatively titled “Her White Breast: Intersections of Race, Gender, and Power in Renaissance Italian Drama.”
After earning a BA and MA in philology and modern languages and literature at the University of Catania, she earned her PhD in Italian Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.
Prior to joining the University of Toronto, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wellesley College, cross-appointed between the Department of Italian Studies and the Medieval and Renaissance Program, where she taught courses on Dante in English translation, women’s literature in Europe and the Mediterranean, premodern globalities, and identity politics in Renaissance literature.
Before joining Wellesley College, Ingallinella held a predoctoral appointment in which she served as associate editor for Speculum, the journal of medieval studies published by the Medieval Academy of America.
She is currently a member of the Centre for the Renaissance and Reformation Studies (CRRS) (2022-) and a Fellow of Victoria University (2022-) in the University of Toronto. She also works on the Nominating Committee of the Dante Society of America (2021-) and is a member of the Cosmopolitan Collective.