Francesca Leonardi is a PhD candidate in Italian and Early Modern Studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on the construction of artistic identity in the Italian Renaissance through autobiographical texts, biographies, treatises, and literary writings. Her dissertation explores strategies of self-fashioning and the relationship between word and image in the courtly culture of sixteenth-century Italy.
She received her B.A. in Italian Studies from the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre in 2016 with a thesis on the poet Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827), and taught Italian literature at a high school in Orvieto from 2017 to 2019. In May 2021, she earned her M.A. in Italian Studies from the University of Notre Dame (IN) with a thesis titled The Aesthetics of Ugliness: Body, Disease, and Materialism in the Works of Giacomo Leopardi.
During the 2024–25 academic year, she worked as a Graduate Research Associate at the Yale University Art Gallery, contributing to the upcoming 2028 exhibition on nineteenth-century Italian drawings from the Roberta J. M. Olson and Alexander B. V. Johnson Collection. As part of the project, she authored several entries for the online catalogue and is currently writing an essay for the printed exhibition catalogue, dedicated to literary and visual representations of Italian identity in the long nineteenth century.
In the upcoming year, she will be affiliated with the Department of Cultural Heritage (Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali) at the University of Padua to continue the research for her dissertation.