Martin Eisner, Assistant Professor of Italian

Martin Eisner

Office Location: 
Office Phone:  (919) 660-3129
Email Address:   send me a message
Web Page: http://www.romancestudies.aas.duke.edu/

In Fall 2007 Professor Eisner will teach a course in English on Dante's Dante Comedy (Italian 143) and the Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature (Italian 111), which is one of the core courses for Italian majors.

Education:

  • PhD, Columbia University, 2005
  • BA, Columbia University, 1999

Research Interests: Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, medieval lyric poety, the European novella tradition, material philology/textual theory, and medieval mysticism

Current projects: philology, textual theory, editorial theory, Dante, Vita nuova, canzoniere, Bocccaccio

Professor Eisner has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Italian from Columbia University, where he completed a dissertation with the lengthy but descriptive title, "Bocccaccio Between Dante and Petrarch: The Chigiano Codex, the Terza Rima Trilogy, and the Shaping of Literary History," which addressed the relations among the "tre corone" as expressed in Boccaccio's vernacular manuscript production. His current book project, "Afterlives of Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’: Materializing Meanings, Manuscript to Print," continues to integrate philological materials into literary criticism, but takes a diachronic rather than synchronic approach in its analysis of the material tradition of Dante's first book, from its earliest manuscripts to the most recent editions and adaptations. Other research interests include medieval lyric poety, the European novella tradition, material philology/textual theory, and medieval mysticism.

Areas of Interest:

Dante
Boccaccio
Petrarch
Medieval
Lyric
Poetry
Textual Theory
Philology
Mysticism
novella
canzoniere
Decameron
Commedia
Divine Comedy

Recent Publications

  1. M. Eisner and M. Schachter, Libido Sciendi: Apuleius, Boccaccio and the History of Sexuality, PMLA (Accepted, March, 2008)  [abs].
  2. Martin Eisner, Petrarch Reading Boccaccio: Revisiting the Genesis of the Triumphi, in Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation, edited by Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (2007), Brill .