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Valeria Finucci

Professor Emerita of Romance Studies
Romance Studies
Box 90257, Durham, NC 27708-0257
219E Language Center, Durham, NC 27708

Research Interests


I am currently working on medical history topics and just co-edited a book with M. Ciavolella and R. Canalis entitled Rethinking Medical Humanities: Perspectives from the Arts and the Social Sciences (DeGruyter, 2022). 
Also co-organizing a symposium on physiognomy from the medical, cultural, philosophical, artistic and literary perspective at UCLA in January 2023 and writing on plant medicines from Egypt examined in Prospero Alpini's De Medicina Aegyptiorum (1591).

Selected Grants


The Nose Job: Plastic Surgery and Bioethics in the Renaissance

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation · 2008 - 2009

Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga's Dilemma, researching female physiology and reproduction in the early modern period

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation · 2002 - 2003

The Equivocal Body: The Castrato in Early Modern Discourses in Italy

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation · 2000 - 2001

Body/Matter/Spirit

ConferencePrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation · 1997 - 1998

Italian Women Writers and the Epic Tradition

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation · 1992 - 1992