Wednesday, March 4, 2020 - 12:00pm to 2:00pm
After graduating summa cum laude from the University of Rome ”La Sapienza” with a thesis on Luigi Pirandello, Laura Benedetti moved to the University of Alberta, where sub-freezing temperatures helped her concentrate on the theme of the garden in Renaissance chivalric poems, which happened to be the topic of her M.A. thesis. From then on, her interests in Renaissance and contemporary culture have fostered each other, leading to a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University and to eight years as a junior faculty at Harvard University, where she became the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities. She joined Georgetown University in 2002 as the first Laura and Gaetano De Sole Professor of Contemporary Italian Culture, and served as the Italian Department Chair from 2009 to 2015, as well as the director of the L’Aquila Community Based Learning Summer Program, which combined advanced language and culture learning and volunteer work. She is currently Book Review Editor of Italian Culture, the official journal of the American Association of Italian Studies.