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Ruben Celani

Postdoctoral Research Associate and Italian Studies Curatorial Fellow

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Office
404 Hesburgh Library
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Phone
574-631-2188
Email
rcelani@nd.edu

Education

  • Ph.D. in Italian Studies, Ghent University
  • B.A. and M.A. in Archival and Library Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome

Biography

Ruben Celani is a postdoctoral researcher and curatorial fellow at Hesburgh Libraries. He works in the department of Rare Books and Special Collections as curator of the Zahm-Devers Dante collection and as subject librarian for Italian Studies. Ruben holds a MA degree in Archival and Library Sciences at Sapienza University of Rome, and has worked with medieval manuscripts, incunables, and early modern archival documents in several institutions across Europe. In 2024, he received his PhD in Italian Studies at Ghent University, with a dissertation on the success of so-called ‘books of secrets’ printed in sixteenth-century Italy. He also taught courses of Renaissance and early modern Italian literature at Ghent University.

His research draws from several disciplines, including Italian literature, the history of ideas, book history, and the history of science and medicine. He is particularly interested in book production in 16th-century Italy, with a focus on the provenance marks and paratextual features of early printed books, and on the (self-)fashioning strategies of the various agents behind their publication.

Research Interests

Renaissance and early modern Italian literature; book history; early modern history of science and medicine; sixteenth-century vernacular print and the Venetian book industry; material studies; history of ideas; practices of (self-)fashioning.

 

Representative Publications

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

  • Celani, Ruben. 2024. “‘Come parto imperfetto’: Paratexts and Organization in a Sixteenth-Century Book of Secrets”, Renaissance Studies 38.1, Special Issue, pp. 89-109.
  • Celani, Ruben. 2022. “Disseminating Knowledge, Refashioning Tradition : Francesco Sansovino and the Popularization of Italian Agronomic Literature”, Revue Beige de Philologie et d’Histoire 100, pp. 835-64.
  • Celani, Ruben. 2022. “(Un)natural Conceptions and Alchemical Transmutations: Making Basilisks in a Sixteenth-Century Italian Book of Secrets”, in Magical Materials in Renaissance Philosophy, Literature, and Art, ed. Rebekah Compton and Donato Verardi (Sarzana: Agora & Co.), pp. 107-135.
  • Celani, Ruben. 2021. “Re-Mediating Recipes. Books of Secrets in the Digital Era”, in Oude boeken, nieuwe podia. Liber amicorum voor Marieke van Delft (Tielt: Lannoo), pp. 55-60.

EDITED VOLUMES

  • Teodoro Katinis, Claudia Crocco and Ruben Celani (eds.). 2024. Paratexts, dissemination, and the book market in early modern Venice (1500-1650), special issue for Renaissance Studies 38.1.