Skye Shirley

Skye Shirley's picture
Address: 
Humanities Quad, 5th Floor
Skye Shirley joins the Yale community this fall semester as part of a doctoral exchange program with University College London.   She is the founder and director of Lupercal, an international organization dedicated to increasing opportunities for women in Latin language studies. During her time at Yale, she will run free events through this organization and collaborate with local leaders, thereby adding New Haven to a list of Lupercal’s local groups which includes Mexico City, London, and Lille.  She is a Latin instructor and curriculum consultant, drawing on her decade of experience teaching Latin learners of diverse ages and levels. Her research centers on Latin poetry by seventeenth-century women, and she joins the Italian department at Yale to better explore two women at the heart of her dissertation: Marta Marchina (1600-1646), a soap-boiler and poet from Naples who lived in Baroque Rome, and Anna Maria Arduino (1672-1700), a Sicilian princess who was among the first women to integrate male literary academies.  Shirley’s work focuses especially on the strategies these women employed to keep writing Latin despite cultural prohibitions against women Latinists.  Her hope is that this work will be informative not only to scholarship on early modern women, but also to activists today who seek to apply effective methods of building resilience within marginalized communities.