Alessandro Giammei (he/him, lui/tu) is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Yale. As a cultural philologist, he specializes in modern and contemporary literature and art, queering their fantasies of genealogical roots in Renaissance, chivalric, and classical traditions.
His book Ariosto in the Machine Age (University of Toronto Press 2024) reveals how the most influential poet of the Renaissance was conjured or appropriated to shape Magical Realism, avant-garde painting, Fascist cultural propaganda, and cinema in modern Italy. It won three awards: the Howard R. Marraro Prize of the MLA, the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, and the Samuel ‘60 and Ronnie ‘72 Heyman Prize at Yale. Besides many essays on the literary and visual culture of early and late modernity, Alessandro also published a monograph on Victorian nonsense-verse in postmodern Italy (Nell’officina del nonsense di Toti Scialoja, edizioni del verri 2014), winner of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize; a short book on why the Renaissance is a zombie (Gioventù degli antenati: Il Rinascimento è uno zombie, Einaudi 2024); and a book, co-authored with Ara Merjian, on Pasolini’s relationship with art and art history (Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting Verso 2023). His public-facing work on masculinity includes the children’s book Cronache e leggende di ragazzi strani (il battello a vapore 2024) and the popular collections of essays Cose da maschi (Einaudi 2023) and Parlare fra maschi (Einaudi 2025).
Alessandro curated and/or translated editions of Dario Villa’s and Giulia Niccolai’s poems, Lytton Strachey’s letters to Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle’s treatise on spirit photography, and all of Michela Murgia’s posthumous books. He serves in the editorial board of the historic journal il verri, for which he edited three special issues, and in the faculty council of the PhD program in Literature at the University of Rome La Sapienza. He regularly writes for newspapers and magazines such as il manifesto, Domani, and Esquire, and his public-facing writing has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Corriere della Sera, The Brooklyn Rail, The Nation, and The Paris Review. With Chiara Tagliaferri, he writes and voices the edition “Sorelle” of the cult podcast Morgana. At present, Alessandro is working on two main projects: a book in Italian titled Orlando Furioso & Star Wars, and a monograph in English on the African-American afterlife of the first duke of Renaissance Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici, as a Black ancestor in the Harlem Renaissance.
Alessandro co-directed the first-year Humanities program “Six Global Perspectives” (2023-2026), offering a popular seminar on knights and co-leading the Friday labs. He introduced new trans-historical courses in the Italian Studies undergraduate program, such as “Black Queer Jewish Italy” and “Gender and the Avant-Garde”, and regularly teaches graduate seminars on modern Italian literature. One night a month, he hosts Queer Italian Pasta at the Yale LGBTQ Center.