Dr. Francesco Aresu

Biography

Francesco Marco Aresu earned his Ph.D. in Italian literature with a secondary field in Classical Philology from Harvard University. He graduated with a Bachelor's in Letters from Università degli Studi di Cagliari in Sardinia and holds Master's degrees from Stanford University and Indiana University. His areas of expertise include Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, manuscript studies, the history of the book, medieval humanistic philology, Sardinian literature, textual criticism, and literary theory. Aresu has published works focusing on Dante’s intertextuality, illustrated incunables of Dante’s Commedia, Italian metrics, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Petrarca’s sestinas, and the manuscript tradition of Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. He has also written about Baroque theater, Folengo’s metatextuality, and Alberti’s early works. Aresu serves as editor of PetrArchive, associate editor of Heliotropia, and editor-in-chief of Bibliotheca Dantesca. His recent book, Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature, was published in 2023 by the University of Notre Dame Press. He teaches Italian Medieval Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, having previously done so at Wesleyan University.

Research Interests