Kate Driscoll, Assistant Professor

Kate Driscoll is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. A multidisciplinary scholar of early modern Italy, Europe, and their global contacts and contexts, her research areas include literary and critical theory, women’s and gender studies, cultural and performance history, and musicology.

Her first book, Tasso among the Muses: Reading and Writing Women in Early Modern Italy (manuscript in progress), is a study of collaboration and collectivity. This work challenges the Romantic construct of “Tasso, the errant madman”—as he has been mythologized by authors from Goethe and Byron, to Baudelaire—by readjusting the focus onto Tasso’s contemporary contexts and the literary communities that shape individual poets and their socially oriented literary production. The book engages with critical discourses of early modern sociability in recasting the image of Tasso from a rootless drifter to a strategic networker of intellectual and artistic communities. Emphasizing previously overlooked examples of collaboration in the history of the book and literary sociability, this research emphasizes the collective nature of Tasso’s writings that locates him within overlapping circles (e.g., courts, academies, and private salons), which welcomed the itinerant poet and fostered participation by women writers, patrons, and performers. 

Dr. Driscoll is the author of "'La donna di poche parole' from Page to Stage: Envoicing Enchantment in Epic Poetry and Early Opera" (The Italianist, 41.1) and "Italian Chivalric Epic Poetry and Female Readers," published as part of Routledge Renaissance World. She is a co-author, along with Michela Ardizzoni and Carmela Scala, of "Building Space for Belonging: The Critical Race, Diasporas, and Migrations Caucus (CRDM)" (Forum Italicum, special issue on Critical Issues in Transnational Italian Studies, 2023). 

Her forthcoming essay, "Curse, Wail, Hiss, Roar: The Limits of Lament in Ariosto's Rodomonte" is scheduled to appear in the Spring 2024 issue of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance.

Her other publications are scheduled to appear in collections dedicated to the representations of female ambassadors in Torquato Tasso and Vivaldi, the history of premodern masculinity, and women readers in early modern Italy.

Before arriving at Duke, Dr. Driscoll was a Visiting Assistant Professor 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 Renaissance Society of America, American Council of Learned Societies, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Modern Language Association, UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, German Excellence Initiative, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

She is a 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
Office Phone:	(919) 660-3101
Email Address:
Web Pages:	https://duke.academia.edu/KateDriscoll https://cmrs.trinity.duke.edu/people/other-faculty/faculty-and-staff

Teaching (Fall 2023):

• ITALIAN 208FS.01, GENDERING THE RENAISSANCE Synopsis

  Social Sciences 109, MW 03:05 PM-04:20 PM

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

• ITALIAN 335.01, MAJOR ITALIAN AUTHORS Synopsis

  Social Sciences 109, MW 01:25 PM-02:40 PM

• HISTORY 89S.01, FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR (TOP) Synopsis

  Allen 318, TuTh 11:45 AM-01:00 PM

  (also cross-listed as ITALIAN 89S.02, LIT 89S.01, MEDREN 89S.01, ROMST 89S.01)

• ITALIAN 545S.01, EPIC AS TRANSLATION Synopsis

  Languages 312, W 03:20 PM-05:50 PM

  (also cross-listed as LIT 585S.01, MUSIC 545S.01, ROMST 545S.01)

Office Hours:

Fall 2023: Monday, 3–5 pm.

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

1. Ardizzoni, M; Driscoll, K; Scala, C, Building space for belonging: The Critical Race, Diasporas, and Migrations Caucus (CRDM), Forum Italicum: a Journal of Italian Studies, vol. 57 no. 2 (August, 2023), pp. 476-487 [doi]
2. Driscoll, K, Italian Chivalric Epic Poetry and Female Readers, Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World (October, 2022) [doi]
3. Driscoll, K, ‘La donna di poche parole’ from Page to Stage: Envoicing Enchantment in Epic Poetry and Early Opera, Italianist, vol. 41 no. 1 (January, 2021), pp. 1-22, Informa UK Limited [doi]