Caroline Castiglione concluded her term as Chair of Italian Studies in summer 2019, turning her focus to a book-length project, “Freedom and Justice in Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women.”

She recently won two external grant awards for her research on Fonte, a sixteenth-century Venetian writer who pondered why the conjuncture of being female and Venetian was often dangerous and sometimes deadly. With the support of the Social Science Research Institute Seed Funding Award and a Franklin Grant from the American Philosophical Society, she undertook research in Venetian archives in 2019. A Delmas Foundation grant awarded in spring 2020 will support additional archival work on this project next year.