Giulia M. Cipriani

2022-23 Stern Center Curatorial Fellow
Ph.D., Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (Italian Section)
Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: gcipria1@jh.edu

Giulia M. Cipriani earned her BA and MA in Italian Literature at the University of Roma Tre where her research focused on the parodic rewriting of Dante’s Comedy in Boccaccio’s Decameron, portions of which have appeared in the academic journal Scaffale Aperto and other scholarly publications. She has also published essays on Dante’s reception in Petrarch and Boccaccio. At Johns Hopkins, she expanded her interests with research into the so-called petrarchiste marchigiane, attempting to establish their professed female Petrarchan verses to in fact be a literary forgery of the sixteenth century. Her doctoral dissertation focused on demons in Italian epic-chivalric poems from Dante to Marino.

Surekha Davies

2019 Stern Center Visiting Research Fellow
Author, Speaker, and Consultant
Ph.D., The Warburg Institute, University of London
E-mail: surekha.davies@gmail.com
Website

Surekha Davies is a writer, speaker, historian, and academic consultant. She is the author of Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which won the 2016 Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history and the 2017 Roland H. Bainton Prize in History/Theology, and was a finalist for the 2018 Pickstone Prize for the best scholarly book in the history of science. Her second book, Humans: A Monstrous History, is under contract with the University of California Press as a lead trade-list title. In 2019, she was named the inaugural Stern Center Research Fellow at Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book, focusing on Richard Eden’s seminal 1555 translation of Peter Martyr’s De orbe nouo, the first systematic attempt to document the New World discovery. Dr. Davies’s work has also been supported by a host of institutional fellowships, including the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the American Philosophical Society, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science among others. Before turning to professional writing full-time in late 2022, she was a historian of science, art, and ideas at Utrecht University in the Netherlands (2019-22); prior to that in 2018 she was awarded tenure and promotion to Associate Professor at Western Connecticut State University. She currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Renaissance Society of America, where she serves as Fellowships Chair.

Martina Franzini

2023-24 Stern Center Curatorial Fellow
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, Italian Section
Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: mfranzi2@jh.edu

Martina Franzini’s research focuses on Italian medieval and Renaissance literature. She is particularly interested in the reception of the classical Greek and Latin tradition, and understanding how these fundamental models influence successive literary production. Prior to Johns Hopkins, she earned her BA in Lettere Moderne from the Università degli Studi di Milano in 2015, and then an MA in Italian Studies from Boston College in 2021 with a thesis exploring literary connections between the Latin poet Statius and the poetic and Christian values in Dante’s verse. She is currently working on an ecocritical reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy, analyzing arboreal metaphors throughout the poem.

Martina Franzini’s Curatorial Fellowship had been generously funded by Harriett and Donlin Long.

Filip Geaman

2022-23 Stern Center Curatorial Fellow
Ph.D., Department of the History of Science and Technology
Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: fgeaman1@jhu.edu

Filip Geaman’s research explores the history of divination, astrology, and magic during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly through its connections to scientific and humanistic interests in the Middle East. His doctoral dissertation focuses on these discourses within the context of long-distance, scholarly correspondence networks circa 1620-1650, with an emphasis on France.

Erin Giffin

2022-23 Stern Center/RSA Visiting Research Fellow
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Art History
Skidmore College
Ph.D., University of Washington, Seattle
E-mail: egiffin@skidmore.edu
Webpages

Erin Giffin’s research focuses on the cult of the Virgin Mary in Loreto, Italy, and its spread throughout the Catholic world during the early modern period. Her interests also include printed media and devotional ephemera, focusing on pilgrimage souvenirs and lost decorative programs associated with the Loretan shrine in the Basilica della Santa Casa. Her scholarly work has been published in journals such as I Tatti Studies and the Print Quarterly, and has been included in numerous edited essay volumes. Dr. Giffin has recently held fellowships at the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and was a contributing researcher to the SACRIMA research group based at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany (2017-21). In Fall 2022, she was awarded a jointly sponsored Renaissance Society of America (RSA) and Stern Center Visiting Research Grant to conduct research on the extensive holdings within the Women of the Book Collection dedicated to the Virgin of Loreto. Her forthcoming monograph is entitled, Translating Space: Replicas of the Holy House of Loreto.

Ambra Marzocchi

2022-23 Stern Center Curatorial Fellow
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Classics
Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: amarzoc2@jhu.edu

Ambra Marzocchi was trained in Italy in classical philology and the history of the classical tradition before studying the Latin tradition under Drs. Tunberg and Minkova at the Institutum Studiis Latinis Provehendis of the University of Kentucky. At Johns Hopkins University she has expanded her work focusing also on the history of the book. Her dissertation research examined specimens of the pedagogy of the classical languages during the early modern period in both European and extra-European contexts. As an Italian-certified national archivist and paleographer, she has worked with mediaeval and early modern documents produced by notaries, seigneuries, as well as the papal chancellery. While living in Italy, she taught classical languages and humanities in private and public high schools; during her time in the United States, she has taught university courses on classical languages and civilizations at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Martin W. Michalek

2023-24 Stern Center Curatorial Fellow
Ph.D., Department of Classics
Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: mmichal6@jhu.edu

Martin works primarily with Greek and Latin poems and their transmission through English vernacular and Neo-Latin verse. Motivating his studies are questions about poetic influence, aesthetics, and instances of deliberate mistranslation or assimilation. Prior to Johns Hopkins, Martin earned his B.A. in English at Brigham Young University, followed by an MLitt in Greek and Latin from the University of St Andrews. He has published and presented on a variety of topics, from Angelo Poliziano’s Renaissance poetic pedagogy to “dislanguagement” in David Ferry’s latter-day translations of Virgil. His doctoral dissertation examines receptions of Horace in English poetry, attending to authors who reintroduced and reshaped Horace’s carpe diem motif to reflect their (and our) evolving relationship with both writing and the past.

Martin Michalak’s Curatorial Fellowship has been generously funded by Meg Heisse.

Amrish Nair

2023-24 Stern Center Curatorial Fellow
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History
E-mail: anair14@jhu.edu

Amrish Nair earned his BA and MA in history from the University of Georgia. His Master’s thesis examined how Spanish religious authorities and the Inquisition received renegades—Spaniards captured by Ottoman corsairs who converted to Islam—during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At Hopkins, Amrish continues to study and write about the history of conversion across the Spanish Empire and Mediterranean world. He is currently interested in writing about the relationship between conversion and the material body by examining a series of altarpieces that depict Sts. Cosmas and Damian performing leg transplants.

Amrish Nair’s Curatorial Fellowship had been generously funded by the family of Deborah and Andre Denis.

Maxim Rigaux

2022-23 Renaissance Society of America/Stern Center Visiting Research Fellow
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Department of Literary Studies, Ghent University
Ph.D. Ghent University, Department of Literary Studies
E-mail: maxim.rigaux@ugent.be
Webpage

In addition to his post-doctoral research at Ghent University, Maxim Rigaux is affiliated with the European Research Council-funded project, Women’s Invisible Ink (WINK) hosted by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His 2018 doctoral dissertation focused on literary epics inspired by the naval victory of the Holy League of Catholic states at the 1571 Battle of Lepanto. Dr. Rigaux has also been awarded postdoctoral fellowships by the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF) and the Fulbright commission, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago in 2018-19. His current research focuses on the cultural and literary histories of the early modern Iberian world, including interactions between Latin and vernacular languages, relationships between text and image, race and gender studies, and multilingualism. He is a co-founder of the research group RELICS, Researchers of European Literary Identity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Schools, and serves as editor-in-chief of the open access scholarly journal JOLCEL, the Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Schools. In Fall 2022, Dr. Rigaux was awarded a jointly sponsored Renaissance Society of America (RSA) and Stern Center Visiting Research Grant to conduct research on Spanish-language literary texts in the Women of the Book Collection.

Neil Weijer

2017-19 Stern Center Postdoctoral Fellow
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, Department of History
E-mail: n.weijer@ufl.edu
Website

Neil Weijer was Curator of the University of Florida’s Harold & Mary Jean Hanson Rare Book Collection, whose holdings illustrate the emergence of literary, cultural, and scientific movements from the late Middle Ages to the present. Beginning in 2019, he worked to develop and promote the collection to engage students and faculty on campus and around the state, increasingly in digital spaces. He launched and directed the project Storied Books at the University of Florida, which sponsors and showcases student research and experimentation in the University’s Special collections. His own research focuses on the history of early books and manuscripts, and especially on the intersections between legendary history, forgery, and scholarly practice in medieval and early modern England. In his previous position as Stern Center Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-19), he contributed extensively to the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe digital humanities project.