Jane Tylus is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature and Divinity at Yale. Her primary focus is late medieval and early modernity, while she also dabbles in the 19th- and 20th-centuries; special interests include the history of the book, religious culture, pastoral and rural writings, and women’s literature. She also works in translation studies and has translated both early modern and modern women writers – most recently Dacia Maraini and (forthcoming) Moderata Fonte. Current book projects include a monograph of her 2024-25 Emilio Goggio Lectures delivered at the University of Toronto, From Dante to Ferrante: Friendship in and among the arts, and, with Bruce Gordon, “Taking Leave: from Gilgamesh to Toni Morison’s Beloved,” based on their class at YDS. She hopes to turn soon to a translation of the writings of the sixteenth-century Sienese nun and erstwhile prostitute Caterina Vanini, and a volume of essays on poet Torquato Tasso’s techniques of straniamento.
Tylus was elected as a socia straniera to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 2024, and has been a socia corrispondente of Siena’s Accademia degli Intronati since 2017. She is active as the member of numerous editorial or advisory boards and served as General Editor of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance from 2013-22. She has taken on a number of administrative roles during her career, including Associate Dean of the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Founding Director of the Center for the Humanities at New York University. Currently she serves as Chair of Italian Studies at Yale.