Borna Treska

Borna Treska received his B.A. in Italian and Croatian Studies from the University of Zagreb (Croatia) in 2018. In October 2020, he earned his M.A., maintaining his focus on Italian and Croatian Studies, with a thesis on animal motifs in Italian and Croatian Renaissance love poetry. Since November 2020, he has been a Ph.D. student in Italian Studies and Modern Philology at Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy). His doctoral dissertation concentrates on lyric poetry written in the Italian language by 16th-century poets from Dubrovnik and Dalmatia. This research explores the intricate construction and dynamic utilization of cultural networks as they concern the realm of lyric poetry of enaissance Dalmatia and Dubrovnik. These interconnected networks not only serve as the foundation that enables lyric poetry, but also function as strategic conduits through which diverse objectives and influences flow, shaping and enriching the poetic landscape with purposes that go beyond the aesthetic domain. The Ragusan and Dalmatian poetry in Italian is therefore approached through the prism of early modern politics, institutions of the Republic of Letters (e.g., literary academies), self-fashioning, and the impact of print.

Borna has been an invited speaker at several academic conferences and has published five articles in scholarly journals. These articles cover diverse topics, including animal motifs in early Renaissance Croatian love poetry, the censorship of Croatian books in Venetian print – with a focus on the figure of the reader by assignment – the portrayal of learned women and women authors in 16th-century Italian poetry of Dubrovnik and Dalmatia, and Michele Monaldi’s Rime (1599).

Borna is a member of the reserach team for the project Premodern Croatian Literature in the European Context: Contacts and Transfers led by Prof. Dolores Grmača from the Department of Croatian Studies, University of Zagreb. Since 2023, he has been collaborating with two Italian scholarly journals: as a member of the editorial staff for Rivista di letteratura religiosa italiana and as a correspondent for the Croatian area for Artes renascentes.

Currently, Borna is a visiting scholar at Yale for the Spring semester in 2023-2024, where he is one of the instructors for the Elementary Italian 120 course in the Department of Italian Studies.