Laura Banella

Laura Banella is an assistant professor in Italian. Her research interests lie in medieval Italian literature. Her research has focused on Dante and Boccaccio and on the books transmitting their works (13th-16th c.). She has also worked on reception, the history of literary criticism, Renaissance literature, the female auctor.

Her current research project explores the physical act of copying, editing, and printing Dante’s lyric poetry from the 14th to the early 16th century in Italy through the study of multi-text and multi-author volumes, both manuscripts and early printed editions. Through the privileged case study of Dante’s reception and ‘canonization’, her work explores the specific kinds of poetic authority and the conditions for canon creation at the passage from the Middle Ages to modernity. It investigates the ways in which ‘national poets’ are born through editing and rewriting, and how major authors influence cultural development.

Professor Banella is a Research Fellow of the University of Oxford, and 2022-2023 Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and Center for Italian Studies Fellow in Italian Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Before coming to Notre Dame, she pursued her postdoctoral research and taught in Italy (University of Padua, University of Milan) and the UK (University of Oxford).