Kate Driscoll, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor

Kate Driscoll is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. Her research centers on early modern Italian literature, chivalric epic poetry, women's writing, classical reception, gender studies, performance history, and opera studies. She focuses especially on literary communities, patronage politics, formal and informal republics of letters, author-reader connections and dynamics, literary hospitality, voice and the spectacle of speech, and musical translations of literary works.

Her first book, Tasso and Women Readers: Literary Hospitality in Early Modern Italy, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in October 2026. This study was awarded the 28th annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association, and the Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award from the Newberry Library. A portion of the book's Chapter Two won the Premio Tasso 2026, awarded by the Centro di Studi Tassiani of Bergamo, Italy.

She is currently collaborating on three projects:

• with Angelica Duran, she is editing The Edinburgh Companion to Renaissance Women and the Arts.
• with Beatrice Fazio, she is editing Gender and Geography in Early Modern Italy: Knowledge Production and Transmission (1400-1700).
• with Jessica Goethals, she is editing and translating Margherita Costa's epic poem-turned-libretto Fertile Flora (Flora feconda, A Mediterranean Epic) for the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series.
  
  Her most recent articles (published and forthcoming) include:
• "Vexed Expectations in a Pregnant Genre: Epic, Maternity, and Empire in Margherita Costa's Flora feconda (1640)," ITER - Immagini e testi per l'Europa del Rinascimento 1 (2026): 109-126
• "Utopia incognita: Tasso's Atlantic and the Decolonial Imagination," Journal of Early Modern Studies 15, special issue on “Material Space and Literary Production in Early Modern Europe” (2026): 167-189
• "Laboring in the Library-Gold Mine: Citational Kinship in Luisa Bergalli's Componimenti poetici delle più illustri rimatrici d'ogni secolo (1726)," forthcoming in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 21.2 (Fall 2027)
  
  Essays and chapters currently in production study the patronage politics of Isabella Pallavicino Lupi of Soragna; the reception of Tasso's life and works by 19th-century English women readers; the intersection between acoustics and affect in Tasso and Monteverdi; the reception of Ariosto's Orlando furioso in Baroque Rome; the cultural and linguistic translation of Gerusalemme liberata in Baroque Naples; and the overlap between genealogical and racialized constructions in Pulci's Morgante. 
  
  Before arriving at Duke, Dr. Driscoll was Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Colorado College and a postdoctoral research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin’s Cluster of Excellence, “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective.” 
  
  Her research has been supported by the Huntington Library, the American Philosophical Society, the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Language Association, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the German Excellence Initiative, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
  
  From 2022-2025, she served as co-editor of the Italian Studies Channel on the New Books Network. Her conversations with authors can be found here.

Contact Info:

Office Location:	205 Language Center, Box 90257, Durham, NC 27708
Email Address:
Web Pages:	https://romancestudies.duke.edu/people/other-faculty/assistant-professors https://cmrs.trinity.duke.edu/people/other-faculty/faculty-and-staff

Teaching (Fall 2026):

• FOCUS 195FS.13, SPECIAL TOPICS IN FOCUS Synopsis

  George/Geo 0040, M 06:15 PM-07:30 PM

• ITALIAN 208FS.01, BIO-LIT Synopsis

  Gross Hall 105, MW 03:05 PM-04:20 PM

  (also cross-listed as GSF 251FS.01, MEDREN 250FS.01, ROMST 208FS.01)

• ROMST 501S.01, METHODS THEORIES ROMANCE STDS Synopsis

  Social Sciences 107, W 08:45 AM-11:15 AM

  (also cross-listed as LIT 540S.01)

Office Hours:

Fall 2025: e-mail for appointment.

Education:

Ph.D.	University of California, Berkeley	2020
M.A.	New York University	2013
B.Mus.	New York University	2011

Keywords:

Epic poetry • Gender • Historiography • Music • Renaissance • Theater • Women poets

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. Driscoll, K, Vexed Expectations in a Pregnant Genre. Epic, Maternity, and Empire in Margherita Costa’s "Flora feconda" (1640), ITER - Immagini e testi per l'Europa del Rinascimento, vol. 1 (August, 2026), pp. 109-126 [doi]  [abs]
2. Driscoll, K, Utopia incognita: Tasso’s Atlantic and the Decolonial Imagination, Journal of Early Modern Studies, vol. 15 (January, 2026), pp. 167-189, Firenze University Press [doi]  [abs]
3. Driscoll, K, The Metamorphic Voice of Barbara Strozzi: Performing Irresolution in Text and Song, La Contesa del canto e delle lagrime (1638), altrelettere (November, 2025), altrelettere [doi]  [abs]
4. Driscoll, K, Rivoletti, Christian, ed. L’Orlando furioso oltre i cinquecento anni: Nuove prospettive di lettura, Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 47 no. 4 (May, 2025), pp. 217-219, University of Toronto Libraries - UOTL [doi]
5. Driscoll, K, Renewal and Accoglienza in Tasso’s Rome, California Italian Studies, vol. 13 no. 1 (November, 2024), California Digital Library (CDL) [doi]  [abs]