Italian Studies

Zoe Langer completed her dissertation, "Dante's Printed Afterlives: Authorship, Authority, and the Early Modern Book (1500 - 1800)," in the Italian Studies Department in 2019. Drawing on the disciplines of book history, visual studies, and reception theory, her dissertation shows how the visual presentation of the Commedia in printed editions yields new insights into the history of reading the poem in early modern Europe. From 2017 to 2018 she was the curatorial fellow at the John Hay Special Collections Library where she curated the exhibition  “The Poetry of Science: Dante’s Comedy and the Crafting of a Cosmos." Langer completed her B.A. in Art History at the University of California, Berkeley and received her M.Phil. in Literature at the University of Cambridge. She has been awarded fellowships from the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Medici Archive Project, and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She previously held the position of postdoctoral fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbuttel, Germany, Postdoc for Piranesi Project in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections University Libraries, Univ. South Carolina, and Librarian at the British School at Rome, Archives and Special Collections.