Francesca Leonardi is a PhD candidate in Italian and Early Modern Studies at Yale University. Her research lies at the intersection of literature and visual culture, with a particular focus on artistic identity, self-fashioning, and the relationship between word and image in Renaissance Italy. Her dissertation, Renaissance Fame: Performing the Self as an Early Modern Artist, examines how Giorgio Vasari, Benvenuto Cellini, and Jacopo Pontormo used different forms of writing to shape artistic identity and reputation within the courtly culture of sixteenth-century Florence.
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.
During the 2025-26 academic year, she was affiliated with the Department of Cultural Heritage (Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali) at the University of Padua, where she conducted dissertation research and further developed her work at the intersection of literary and art-historical studies.