Dr Nicolò Crisafi
Contact
Location
- Pembroke College, Trumpington Street , CB2 1RF
About
Dr Nicolò Crisafi (DPhil Oxon) is Keith Sykes Fellow in Italian Studies and Director of Studies in Modern Languages at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is Affiliate Lecturer at the Faculty and was previously Stipendiary Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, and ICI Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin.
Research
Research interests
Dr Crisafi researches medieval Italian literature, with a special focus on the works of Iacopone da Todi, Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio
His research interests in medieval Italian literature lie in narrative theory, the role of the reader(s), the relation between language, affect, and gender, and the intersection between narrative forms and worldviews.
His monograph Dante’s Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the ‘Commedia’ (Oxford: OUP, 2022) explores paradoxes, detours, and representations of the future as alternatives to the dominant narrative of Dante’s Commedia: the teleological ‘masterplot’.
Dr Crisafi welcomes enquiries from prospective graduate students on topics related to his research interests.
Teaching interests
Dr Crisafi’s teaches medieval Italian literature, with additional experience in modern Italian literature and language. At the Faculty, he teaches:
- IT1: Texts and Contexts
- IT5: Boccaccio’s Florence
- IT7: Dante and Culture of his Age
- ITB1: Use of Italian
He welcomes queries from current and prospective students of all backgrounds, identities, and creeds.
Published works
Monograph
- Dante’s Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the ‘Commedia’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022)
Articles and chapters
- ‘Who bore it best? Shame and the Precarious Poetics of Iacopone and Dante’, SubStance (accepted)
- ‘Endurer l’au-delà : psychologie et météo dans La Divine Comédie’ (with M. Gragnolati), Po&sie, 191–192 (2025), 79–96
- The Divine Comedy, Poetry and Criticism series (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2024)
- ‘The Episode of the Gabbo: Cavalcantian Transfigurations, Gendered Addressees, (Mis)interpretation’, in The ‘Vita nova’: A Collaborative Reading, ed. Z. Barański, D. Bowe, and H. Webb (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2024)
- ‘Medieval Self-Fashioning: Performances of Marginality and Authority in Jacopone and Dante’, in Iacopone da Todi, ed. M. Leonardi and A. Vettori (Leiden: Brill, 2023)
- ‘Interrupted and unfinished: The Open-ended Dante of the Commedia’, in Openness in Medieval Europe, ed. M. Gragnolati and A. Suerbaum (Berlin: ICI Berlin, 2022)
- ‘The Master Narrative and its Paradoxes’, in The Oxford Handbook of Dante, ed. M. Gragnolati, E. Lombardi, and F. Southerden (Oxford: OUP, 2021), pp. 513–528
- ‘Weathering the Afterlife: Language, Subjectivity, and tempo in Dante’s Commedia’ (with M. Gragnolati), in On Weathering, ed. C. Holzhey and A. Wedemeyer (Berlin: ICI Berlin, 2020), pp. 63–91
- ‘Guai narrativi nella cornice dei superbi: Cattiva infinità, teleologia, e possibilità’, Chroniques Italiennes, 39.2 (2020), 242–260
- ‘Lust and Law: Reading and Witnessing in Inferno 5’ (with E. Lombardi), in Ethics, Politics, and Justice in Dante, ed. C. Keen and G. Gaimari (London: UCL Press, 2019), pp. 63–79
Selected public scholarship
- ‘Dante ai Caraibi’ (with J. Allen-Paisant, G. Benzi, and A. Montefusco), Jacobin Italia (8 September 2021)
- ‘“Look, I Overcame!”, contesting normative narratives with Dante’s Comedy’, OUPblog (7 September 2021)
- ‘Defascistizzare Dante’, Jacobin Italia (2 June 2021)