Karla Mallette Research Seminar

“Petrarch at Sea: Late Style in the Canzoniere”

Karla Mallette, Professor of Italian, University of Michigan, will hold a research seminar under the sponsorship of the Italian Studies program. Her first book, The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History, traced the transition between Arabic and Italian literary traditions in medieval Sicily; her second, European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean, reread a southern European tradition of scholarship that identifies the origins of modernity in the contact between Islamic and Christian civilizations in the medieval Mediterranean. Dr. Mallette’s current project, tentatively titled “Lingua franca in the Mediterranean,” studies linguistic strategies used to communicate across the boundaries that language creates.