Walter Stephens

Visiting Professor--Fall 2016

Address:

82-90 Wall St, Room 410, New Haven, CT 06520-8311

Walter Stephens is the Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of German and Romance Languages at Johns Hopkins University, co-editor of MLN Italian, and founder of Great Books at Hopkins for undergraduates.

He has been a visiting professor of Italian at Yale University (2012) and the Université François Rabelais in Tours, France (2008), and has taught a faculty seminar on “Writing and Wonder” at the Folger Institute (2008). He has been a visiting fellow at the Oxford University colleges of All Souls (2004–05) and Christ Church (2009), at the Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Durham, U.K. (2012), and at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the Oriental Institute of Oxford University (2014). Stephens’s teaching and research explore the relation of medieval and Renaissance literature to theology, witchcraft, literary forgery, and the history of scholarship.

This Fall 2016 he will teach the following course:

ITAL 710a (u) Magic, Marvel, and Monstrosity in the Italian Renaissance Walter Stephens

Literary masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance provide vivid illustrations of the early modern sense of wonder. Early modern ideas about the nature of reality were bound up with questions and issues very different from those of our time. With the exact sciences still being invented, the nature of the world was much less hard and fast for Renaissance people than for the modern educated person. A reading of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532) and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581) will be prepared earlier in the semester by discussions of fifteenth- and sixteenth century dialogues, theater, and philosophy.

M 2.30-4.20