Jo Ann Cavallo

Jo Ann Cavallo, Professor of Italian and current Italian Department Chair at Columbia University, specializes in the Italian Renaissance romance epic and its performance traditions in the Mediterranean. Her most recent book, The World beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto (University of Toronto Press, 2013), was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies (2011) and is forthcoming in Italian translation (with Il saggiatore). She is also the author of Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato: An Ethics of Desire (Associated University Presses, 1993), The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure (University of Toronto Press, 2004), and co-editor of Fortune and Romance: Boiardo in America (MRTS, 1998). Her articles focus on early Christian and gnostic literature (the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Truth), Italian authors from the medieval to the modern period (Marco Polo, Dante, Petrarch, Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Tasso, Giordano Bruno, and Elsa Morante), and folk traditions that dramatize epic narratives (Sicilian puppet theater and the epic Maggio of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines). Her documentary on the Maggio is entitled Il maggio emiliano: ricordi, riflessioni, brani (2003). Her current project is a co-edited volume of essays entitled “Speaking Truth to Power from Medieval to Modern Italy” scheduled to be published as a special issue of Annali d’Italianistica in 2016. Professor Cavallo has also adapted several episodes from Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato into comedies that have been performed in various regions of Italy (2000-2006), and in English translation in New York City (Medieval Festival at Fort Tryon Park, 2003; Central Park’s Naumburg Bandshell, 2006).