Our Faculty

Background

Olivia Holmes’ research and teaching range across English, Italian, and Medieval Studies. Her scholarship focuses on Italian medieval literature, especially the writers Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, in the context of European intellectual and material history. She is especially interested in issues of human identity, such as how pre-modern literary works reflect their authors’ understandings of human consciousness. 

She has published three monograph books: Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book; Dante’s Two Beloveds: Ethics and Erotics in the “Divine Comedy”; and Boccaccio and Exemplary Literature: Ethics and Mischief in the “Decameron.” She has also published numerous articles and has co-edited (or is currently co-editing) six volumes of essays on medieval topics, and is editor-in-chief of the journal Mediaevalia.

Select Publications

• Boccaccio and Exemplary Literature: Ethics and Mischief in the Decameron (Cambridge UP, 2023).
• “Doing Unto Others, or Sienese Polyamory (Decameron VIII.8), chapter of The Decameron: Eighth Day in Perspective, ed. W. Robins (U of Toronto P, 2020).
• Reconsidering Boccaccio: Medieval Contexts and Global Intertexts, co-edited with Dana Stewart (U of Toronto P, 2018).
• “Petrarch and his Vernacular Lyric Predecessors,” chapter of The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, ed. A. Ascoli and U. Falkeid (Cambridge UP, 2015).
• Dante’s Two Beloveds: Ethics and Erotics in the Divine Comedy (Yale UP, 2008).
• Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (U of Minnesota P, 2000). Winner of the American Association of Italian Studies Book Award.

Education

• PhD, Italian and Comparative Literature, Northwestern University
• MFA, Poetry Workshop, University of Iowa
• BA, English Literature, Yale University (“Magna cum laude”)

Research Interests

• Italian Literature
• Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio
• Medieval Studies
• Early Modern Studies
• Pre-modern Lyric Poetry
• The Short-Story Tradition
• Authorship
• Rhetorical Discourse
• Medieval Philosophy

Teaching Interests

• Sicily in the Italian Cultural Imagination
• Rhetorical Foundations: Literary Criticism and Rhetoric from Plato to the Renaissance
• Medieval 101: Introduction to Medieval and Early Modern Studies
• Dante’s Divine Comedy
• Boccaccio’s Decameron: Love in a Time of Plague
• Why Read? Pre-modern Narrative after the Cognitive Turn (graduate class)

Awards

• Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship
• Audrey Lumsden Kouvel Fellowship, Center for Renaissance Studies, The Newberry Library, Chicago
• Fulbright Scholarship to Italy