Charlie West

Charlie previously completed his Bachelor’s in Italian at Spanish (2023), and his Master’s in Medieval Studies (2024), at the University of Oxford. He also studied History of Art at the University of Córdoba on an Erasmus Exchange (2021-22), and has taught English as a Foreign Language in Lombardy and Poland.

His Master’s thesis, ‘Mentioning the Unmentionable: Dante’s Sodomites in the Commentaries’, explored the treatment of sexual and gender deviancy in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century commentaries on the Commedia, applying a queer analysis to a corpus of late-medieval texts and illuminations. His work generally focuses on queering the medieval and early modern periods, and in particular the limits and boundaries of ‘manhood’, having worked on the queer possibilities of representations of Saint Sebastian, as well as studying writers such as Poliziano, Michelangelo, and Cellini. As well as the application of queer theory, Charlie has a keen interest in the visual and material culture of late medieval and early modern Europe, having undertaken palaeographic and codicological research into various manuscripts and charters in the libraries and archives of Oxford. During his PhD Yale, he is looking forward to further developing his interdisciplinary approach towards studying Italian culture.