Position Title
Assistant Professor of Italian
Affiliated Faculty of the Study of Religion
I am a feminist medievalist specializing in the literature, law, and history of the Italian Middle Ages (12th-14th centuries).
My first book argues that Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), famous for the Decameron and its down-to-earth short stories about religion and sexuality, was a cutting-edge legal theorist of consent. Boccaccio studied canon law at the university in Naples and his later fictional works dramatize legal cases and comment on theories of jurisprudence. Boccaccio found a particular affinity with Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1140), a foundational textbook in the teaching of medieval canon law. Gratian and Boccaccio alike advocate for women’s—and men's—status as consenting subjects, in sharp contrast to social practice of the time.
My work on consent in matters of marriage and sexuality, originating in medieval canon law, has now expanded to encompass the broader history of consent—from sex to law to political obligation to bioethics to digital privacy—which I cover in my course Humanities 2A: Consent. Within the Italian program at UC Davis, I offer courses on Boccaccio, Dante, lyric poetry, Renaissance literature, and contemporary Italian culture.
I am also Associate Editor on the editorial board of Digital Dante, a venue for research on Dante and his world. Our collaborations in digital humanities bring innovative scholarship on Dante to a global readership.
- PhD, Italian and Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University
- MA, Italian, Columbia University
- BA, Italian, German, and Creative Writing, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- AA, Liberal Arts, Greenfield Community College
- Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch
- Consent studies
- Gratian and Medieval Canon Law
- History of Gender and Sexuality
- Law and literature
- Medieval Italian History
- "Fraudulent Counsel: Legal Temporality and the Poetics of Liability in Dante’s Inferno, Boniface VIII’s Liber Sextus, and Gratian’s De penitentia” (Speculum 98.3, July 2023)
- “The Tale of Margherita, a Self-Willed Wife: Decameron IX.7,” in The Decameron Ninth Day in Perspective, ed. Barsella & Marchesi (University of Toronto Press, 2022), 158-81
- “The Economics of Conjugal Debt from Gratian’s Decretum to Decameron 2.10: Boccaccio, Canon Law, and the Loss of Interest in Sex,” in Reconsidering Boccaccio, ed. Holmes & Stewart (University of Toronto Press, 2018), 133-63