Laura Ingallinella is a Romance philologist with a focus on medieval Italian and French literature. Her work focuses on how late medieval communities engaged with devotional storytelling by creating, disseminating, and translating texts, and in doing so, developed communal and individual authorial voices. Laura’s doctoral work, which is the basis of her current monograph, focused on prose collections of saints’ lives in French and Italian and their networks of transmission across medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Laura is currently completing her first book, the critical edition of the Storia aurea, a collection of lives of the apostles and early Christian martyrs translated from French around 1460 by a Florentine merchant, Giovanni Cherichi, then living in Geneva. Her future book project will Dante Alighieri’s relationship with truth, truthfulness, and community building in the Divine Comedy.

In 2019, Laura joined Wellesley College as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies and English & Creative Writing. Here, she teaches the Divine Comedy and courses on the literature of the global Middle Ages. Before joining Wellesley College, she served as Associate Editor for Speculum, the journal of medieval studies published by the Medieval Academy of America.

Laura received a B.A. (laurea triennale) in Modern Languages and Literatures and an M.Litt. (laurea magistrale) in Modern Philology at the University of Catania. She earned her Ph.D. in Italian philology from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Medieval and early modern Italian and French literature; Romance philology; manuscript studies; digital humanities and network analysis; hagiography and homiletics; phenomenology of religion

TEACHING INTERESTS

Medieval and early modern Italian, English, and French literature (including Dante); global Middle Ages; world literature; race, gender, and sexuality; medievalism; digital humanities; book history, paleography, and manuscript studies

CONTACT

Email: laura.ingallinella@wellesley.edu
Twitter: @lauraingalli