Berkley Center

Laura Benedetti is the Laura and Gaetano Professor of Contemporary Italian Culture in the Georgetown University Department of Italian. Her publications span seven hundred years, from Boccaccio to Elena Ferrante, and include La sconfitta di Diana. Un percorso per la Gerusalemme liberata, The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in 20th-Century Italy (winner of the Flaiano International Prize), the edition and English translation of Lucrezia Marinella’s Exhortations to Women and to Others If They Please, and the novels Un paese di carta and Secondo piano. Her most recent research project focuses on an early sixteenth-century travelogue, Zaccaria Pagani’s account of his journey from Venice to Cairo. She has received fellowships from the Renaissance Society of America, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.