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Martin Eisner

Professor of Romance Studies
Romance Studies
Box 90257, Durham, NC 27708-0257
205 Language Center, Box 90257, Durham, NC 27708
Office hours On research leave for 2025-26 academic year.  

Overview


Martin Eisner is Professor of Italian at Duke University.

His first three books show how an attention to the materiality of texts can transform our understandings of literary history, whether on the scale of the single manuscript, the single work, or the individual biography. In Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge UP, 2013), he shows Boccaccio’s crucial role in the construction of the Italian literary tradition by scrutinizing one remarkable manuscript. The book was published in Italian as Boccaccio e l'invenzione della letteratura italiana(Salerno, 2022). In Dante's New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature (Oxford UP, 2021), he demonstrates how investigating the transformations of Dante Vita nuova across multiple material forms, from medieval manuscripts to modern movies, can yield new interpretations. The book won the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association. In Boccaccio, the Disguised Revolutionary, which is part of Reaktion Books's Renaissance Lives series, he brings into focus Boccaccio's innovative thinking about desire, language, gender, cultural diversity, and power through the lens of the manuscripts Boccaccio used and wrote.

His next project, provisionally entitled "Dante's Moon: The Curious History of a Cosmic Question”, proposes a new model of intellectual history that highlights how the reception of Dante’s Paradise produced new discursive spaces of poetry, politics, physics, protest, philology, and pedagogy in the works of Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Galileo, Angela Tarabotti, Vico, and Maria Montessori, respectively. His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the American Academy in Rome, the American Philosophical Association, and the Fulbright Foundation.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Professor of Romance Studies · 2020 - Present Romance Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

In the News


Published January 10, 2023
Why We're Still Reading Dante Seven Centuries Later
Published September 9, 2021
The real scandal of Dante’s Beatrice
Published August 26, 2021
Dante's World Is Bigger Than Hell

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Recent Publications


Dante's New Life of the Book A Philology of World Literature

Book · March 18, 2021 Dante's New Life of the Book examines Dante's Vita nuova through its transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations. ... Cite

Dante's New Life of the Book A Philology of World Literature

Book · March 2021 Dante's New Life of the Book examines Dante's Vita nuova through its transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations. ... Cite
View All Publications

Education, Training & Certifications


Columbia University · 2005 Ph.D.
Columbia University · 2002 M.Phil.
Columbia University · 1999 B.A.

External Links


Publications