Peter Scharer

Research and Teaching Interests

Translation, Second Language Pedagogy, Comparativism, Deconstruction

Biography

Peter Scharer is a second-year M.A. student in Italian Studies. He received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, where his undergraduate thesis investigated the reception of Giuseppe Mazzini's unificatory politics in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian nationalisms of Surendranath Banerjea and Aurobindo Ghose. Current research looks into the sixteenth-century Italian prose translation published in Venice as Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli: this is a text whose uncited source has been established by nineteenth- and twentieth-century philologists to be Hasht-bihisht, a Persian masnavi (narrative poem) composed in the early fourteenth century by Amir Khusrau of Delhi. Broadly speaking, Peter Scharer is interested in how travel writings, political biographies and literary translations from the early modern and modern period disclose a persistent effort to define the Italian peninsula and Indian subcontinent in relation to one another.