About Me

I’m an Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages at Hunter College, CUNY, and Doctoral Faculty in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Since 2021, I have been the Faculty Director of ACERT, the Academic Center for Excellence in Research and Teaching at Hunter College.

My research and teaching focus on medieval Italian literature, the reception of the classics, digital humanities and pedagogy, and translation. My first book Italian Readers of Ovid from the Origins to Petrarch (Brill, 2020) studies the influence of the Latin poet Ovid on 13th- and 14th-century Italian poetry. My work has appeared in journals such as Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, Italian Studies, and Studi Danteschi.

I’m the Managing Editor of Digital Dante, a curated open-access scholarly site on Dante’s works and world. Together with Columbia University Libraries I created Intertextual Dante, an interactive digital tool to read Dante’s Divine Comedy alongside its sources. I hold a PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University; the Intertextual Dante project grew out of my dissertation research on Ovid and Dante.

I currently serve as the Secretary of the Dante Society of America.

On this website I share more information about my research and teaching. The birds in the header are sketches by a 15th-century monk. Please feel free to get in touch with me at jv41 {at} hunter.cuny.edu.