Albert Russell Ascoli, Ph.D. Cornell University, is Terrill Distinguished Professor. His principal field of study is Medieval and Early Modern Italian culture from the 13th to the 16th centuries. Teaching and research interests include the relations between literary form and history; intertwined configurations of authorship and readership; the construction of Italian national identity from the Renaissance to the Risorgimento; literary politics of gender; Dante, Machiavelli, Ariosto. His point of departure is always the close, historically and culturally informed, reading of texts, literary and other; these readings, however, frequently give rise to methodological and/or theoretical interrogation of critical practice. Most significant recent published works include Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (edited, with Krystyna Von Henneberg, Berg Press, 2001), and a series of publications on Dante's evolving conceptions of authorship and authority. His book Dante and the Making of a Modern Author is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

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