The spring lectures are being planned in a hybrid online and in-person format. Please register here.  The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture by Professor Martin Eisner (Duke University) titled: Boccaccio, the Disguised Revolutionary   Medieval and renaissance, feminist and misogynist, radical and conservative, class-warrior and aspiring aristocrat, Boccaccio has been interpreted in a variety of contradictory ways since the fourteenth century. Prof. Eisner's lecture proposes a new way of reading Boccaccio's work that puts the Decameron at the center to show how the revolutionary ideas about fleshly desire, language, gender, cultural diversity, and power that Boccaccio identifies in the Author's Conclusion to the Decameron radiate throughout his works.   Martin Eisner is chair of romance studies and professor of Italian at Duke University. He is the author of Dante's New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature (Oxford UP, 2021), which won the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association. His first book Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge UP, 2013) has recently been published in Italian as Boccaccio e l'invenzione della letteratura italiana (Salerno, 2022). He is currently working on a biography of Boccaccio for Reaktion Books's Renaissance Lives series. He continues to develop the online research project Dante’s Library. His articles on Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Machiavelli have appeared in PMLA, Renaissance Quarterly, Dante Studies, Mediaevalia, California Italian Studies, Quaderni d’Italianistica, Annali d’Italianistica, and Le Tre Corone. His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the American Academy in Rome, the American Philosophical Association, and the Fulbright Foundation. The lecture is co-sponsored by the Medieval Institute.The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The Seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The Seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.

Joe Soss is the inaugural Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service at the University of Minnesota, where he holds faculty positions in the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Department of Political Science, and the Department of Sociology. His research and teaching explore the interplay of democratic politics, societal inequalities, and public policy. He is particularly interested in the political sources and consequences of policies that govern social marginality and shape life conditions for socially marginal groups. His coauthored book, "Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race" (2011), was selected for the 2012 Michael Harrington Award (APSA, New Political Science) and the 2012 Oliver Cromwell Cox Award (ASA, Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities), the 2012 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award (American Library Association), and the 2015 Herbert Simon Award (APSA, Section on Public Administration). In 2010, he received the campus-wide Outstanding Faculty Award from the University of Minnesota's Council of Graduate Students (COGS). In 2013-14, he served as Dale T. Mortensen Senior Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. In 2016, Professor Soss was honored with the University's campus-wide award for outstanding contributions to graduate education, named a Distinguished University Teaching Professor, and inducted into the UMN Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Outside his academic work, Soss is an active musician and recently released an album, The Sound of Sweet Ruin. Professor Soss will be joined by Professor Chloe Thurston. Professor Thurston's research is on American political development, political economy, and public policy, with a particular interest in how politics and public policy shape market inequalities along the lines of race and gender. She is the author of "At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination and the American State" (Cambridge University Press, 2018), her research has been published in Studies in American Political Development; Politics, Groups, and Identities; and the Journal of Public Policy, and commentaries have appeared in The Daily Beast, Ms., and The Monkey Cage (Washington Post), among others. Thurston is currently working on two projects related to the politics of credit, debt, and asset inequality in the U.S. The first of these (joint with Emily Zackin) examines the rise and fall of a protective debt relief regime in the United States. The second examines the political economy asset and wealth inequality following key civil rights reforms in the 1960s and 1970s. Thurston received her B.A. in economics and political science from Johns Hopkins University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2019-2020, she was a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Originally published at rooneycenter.nd.edu.