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Rebecca Bowen

Assistant Professor of Italian Studies

Rebecca Bowen, a woman with long brown hair and turquoise blouse. She is smiling.
Office Hours
Monday 2:00pm - 4:00pm
Office
356 Decio Faculty Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Email
rbowen2@nd.edu

Education

PhD (DPhil), University of Oxford

MSt (Master’s Degree), University of Oxford

MA (Undergraduate Degree), University of Edinburgh

Biography

Rebecca Bowen is assistant professor of Italian specialised in the medieval and early modern periods. Her research focuses on early Italian lyric poetry and the works of Dante, exploring the relationships between texts, images and objects. Her first monograph investigates the words and images used to represent love from classical Antiquity, through Latin Late Antiquity and into the era of the vernacular European languages, bringing the medieval Italian canon into conversation with understudied Late Latin poets as well as canonical authors including Virgil, Ovid and Dante.

Rebecca’s current research is focused on the reception of Dante’s Commedia in the first era of printing in Italy (c. 1470–1600). Looking closely at the nearly 100 editions printed in this timespan, her research explores the ways in which Dante and his medieval poem were transformed by and for a new ‘renaissance’ readership. Placing these early printed books in the context of the scientific and technological advances that were transforming travel on a truly global scale for the first time in European history, she sheds new light on the role played by Dante’s otherworldly journey in mediating the wanderlust of sixteenth-century Italian readers.

Before coming to Notre Dame, Rebecca was a Clarendon Scholar and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Oxford and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Insitut in Florence (KHI), part of the Max-Planck-Institut. Rebecca remains an Associate Fellow at the KHI, where she founded and directs “Dante Depicted: A Commentary on Image, Text, and Exegesis Around the Commedia”. This digital platform promotes detailed interdisciplinary study of Dante’s poem and the visual traditions inspired by it. Rebecca’s work has been published by Anglo- and Italophone journals including Dante Studies, Italian Studies, Filologia Antica e Moderna, and the journal of the Modern Humanities Research Association.

She has taught medieval Italian literature (with a focus on Dante and early lyric) in Oxford and Florence since 2017.

Research Interests

Dante; Italian lyric poetry; text-image relations; classical reception; history of the early printed book.

Representative Publications

Articles and Book Chapters

  • “Seeing the Divine Comedy in Early Print”, in Looking for Dante: Exploring the 'Divine
    Comedy' in Print from the 15th Century to Today, ed. by Wuon-Gean Ho, Simon Gilson
    and Rebecca Bowen (Taylor Institution Library: Oxford, 2024), pp. 69–94. ISBN-13:
    9781838464196.
  • “Modernizing Myths at the Turn of the 15 th Century: Dante, the Leandreride, and an
    Illustrated Ovid”, Dante Studies, 141 (2023): 121–148. DOI: 10.1353/das.2023.a930673.
  • “Occhi Fissi’: Fixing the Gaze in Dante’s Commedia”, Italian Studies, 78:1 (2023): 1–18.
    DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2022.2158272.
  • Rebecca Bowen (70%) and Alessandro Zammataro (30%) ‘Ero e Leandro: mitologia e
    temi lirici in una postilla al Purgatorio XXVIII (v. 73) nel ms. Urb. Lat. 366’, Filologia
    Antica e Moderna, 5.1 (2023): 47–78.
  • “Botticelli: Paradiso 21”, in Dante Depicted: A Commentary on Image, Text, and
    Exegesis around the ‘Commedia’, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (2023) DOI:
    10.17617/1.9xjf-dd86.
  • “Vita Nova 13” in Dante's "Vita Nova" : A Collaborative Reading, edited by Zygmunt G.
    Baranski and Heather Webb (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023), pp. 117–124.
  • “Vita Nova 25”, in Dante's "Vita Nova" : A Collaborative Reading, edited by Zygmunt G.
    Baranski and Heather Webb (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023), pp. 228–234.
  • “Languages of Desire in Botticelli and Dante: Paradiso 21”, in Desire, ed. by Hayley O'Kell and Alma Prelec (= MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 16 (2022)): 10–18.

Edited Volumes

  • Looking for Dante: Exploring the 'Divine Comedy' in Print from the 15th Century to
    Today, ed. by Wuon-Gean Ho, Simon Gilson and Rebecca Bowen (Taylor Institution
    Library: Oxford, 2024). ISBN-13: 9781838464196.

Digital Projects

  • “Dante Depicted: A Commentary on Image, Text, and Exegesis around the Commedia”,
    founder and editor, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, https://dante.khi.fi.it/, DOI:
    10.17617/1.97.

Exhibition Curation

Additional Works