Cogut Institute for the Humanities
Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

2020 Research and Teaching Report: Alani Hicks-Bartlett

During the course of 2019-20, Alani Hicks-Bartlett completed the following articles on Early Modern Literature and Culture:

  • on Petrarch and the Petrarchan Tradition (Fragments of Culture between Diaspora, Language and Semiotics in Honour of Paul A. Colilli, and “‘Amb[e] le chiavi del [s]uo cuor’: lo spargamos e il topos della distanza nel Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” Rivista di Studi Italiani, vol. 37, no. 2)
  • on Early Modern theater (“War, Tyranny, and Political Sacrifice in Luis Vélez de Guevara’s Más pesar el rey que la sangre,” in Theatres of War: A Contemporary Perspective, Metheun Drama)
  • on questions of embodiment in Montaigne (“Unsettled Foundations and the Downward Pull: Intersections of Body and Text, Falling and Fragility in Montaigne’s Essais,” MLN, French Issue)
  • on speech acts and evidence in Cervantes’s Don Quijote, (“‘Confesar o morir’: Failed Promises and Ocular Proof in the Silk-Merchant Episode (I.4) of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha,” Hispanic Review, vol. 87, no. 4)
  • on classical intertexts and Early Modern visual culture in Garcilaso’s “Con ansia estrema de mirar,” and the anonymous “Oh mudo despertador del apetito!” (“On Thresholds, Pygmalionesque Fantasies, and the ‘Lascivo Impulso’ in Spanish Early Modern Erotic Poetry,” in Pornographic Sensibilities: On the Culture of Sex and the Visceral in Imperial Modern Spain).

She continues to work on larger projects on (dis)ability in Early Modern prose works (supported by a research fellowship from the Consortium for History of Science, Medicine, and Technology), and on Medieval and Early Modern representations of the Pygmalion myth.

Alani presented her work on Early Modern literature at various venues, among which were the MLA, where she gave the paper :“In un velo avolto”: Icons and Ambiguity in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata”; the University of Toronto’s Fragments of Culture between Diaspora, Language and Semiotics Conference, where she spoke on Ovid and doubt in Petrarch and Early Modern Petrarchan poets: “‘Deteriora sequor’: l’incertezza epistemologica in “I’vo pensando’”; and Yale’s Renaissance Lunch Colloquium, where she gave a presentation on an upcoming major project investigating portraits and self-representation, titled “On Portraiture and the Lost Orbit: Petrarch, Montaigne, Cervantes.”