Renewal and Accoglienza in Tasso’s Rome

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.

Dr. Driscoll is completing her first book, Tasso among the Muses: Literary Hospitality in Early Modern Italy, a study of collaboration and collectivity between Torquato Tasso and the women writers, patrons, and performers with whom he interacted. 

Her most recent articles include:
"Renewal and accoglienza in Tasso's Rome," California Italian Studies 13.1 (2024).
"Curse, Growl, Hiss, Wail: The Limits of Language in Ariosto's Rodomonte," I Tatti Studies 27.1 (2024). 

She has a forthcoming article in the leading journal in her field: "Heiress to Fiction: Marfisa and the Macabre Legacy of Chivalric Ferrara," scheduled to appear in the Winter 2024 issue of Renaissance Quarterly.

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 other publications for edited collections include essays on female ambassadors in Torquato Tasso and Antonio Vivaldi, representations of New World masculinity in Baroque opera, and the intersections between acoustics and affect between Tasso and Monteverdi.

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 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.

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.