Italian Chivalric Epic Poetry and Female Readers

Kate Driscoll is 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.

She is completing her first book, Tasso and Women Readers: Literary Hospitality in Early Modern Italy (under contract with Cambridge University Press). With Beatrice Fazio, she is editing Gender and Geography in Early Modern Italy: Knowledge Production and Transmission. With Jessica Goethals, she is editing and translating Margherita Costa's epic-turned-libretto Fertile Flora (Flora feconda, A Mediterranean Epic) for the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series.

Her most recent articles include:

- "Utopia incognita: Tasso's Atlantic and the Decolonial Imagination," forthcoming in Journal for Early Modern Studies 16, special issue on “Material Space and Literary Production in Early Modern Europe” (2026)

- "Laboring in the Library-Gold Mine: Luisa Bergalli's Componimenti poetici delle più illustri rimatrici d'ogni secolo (1726)," forthcoming in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2026)

- "The Metamorphic Voice of Barbara Strozzi: Performing Irresolution in Text and Song," altrelettere 14 (2025) (open access: https://www.altrelettere.uzh.ch/article/view/9677/7754)

- "Heiress to Fiction: Marfisa and the Macabre Legacy of Chivalric Ferrara," Renaissance Quarterly 74.4 (2024). (open access: https://doi.org/10.1017/rqx.2024.432)

- "Marfisa’s Requiem, Merlinesque and Atlantean: Undying Spectacle in Twentieth-Century Ferrara," Letteratura cavalleresca italiana 6 (2024).
(https://www.libraweb.net/sommari.php?chiave=141)

- "Renewal and accoglienza in Tasso's Rome," California Italian Studies 13.1 (2024).
(https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8qb6s9p5)

- "Curse, Growl, Hiss, Wail: The Limits of Language in Ariosto's Rodomonte," I Tatti Studies 27.1 (2024). 

- "'La donna di poche parole' from Page to Stage: Envoicing Enchantment in Epic Poetry and Early Opera" (The Italianist, 41.1)

- "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 other publications for edited collections include essays on female ambassadors in Tasso and Vivaldi, representations of New World masculinity in Baroque opera, the intersections between acoustics and affect in Tasso and Monteverdi, and the overlap between genealogical, gendered, and racial 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 Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Modern Language Association, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the German Excellence Initiative, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

From 2022-April 2024, she served as co-editor of the Italian Studies Channel on the New Books Network. Her conversations with authors can be found here.