Beatrice Fazio

Beatrice Fazio (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2024) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and affiliated faculty at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on Renaissance and early modern Italian literature and Mediterranean culture, with particular interest in how physical and imagined spaces shaped literary production, the circulation of knowledge, and the construction of social, political, and intellectual hierarchies. Her article “Writing the City: From Humanist Rhetoric to Machiavelli’s Geocriticism” (forthcoming with Viator) examines how real and symbolic geographies actively influenced the cultural identity of Renaissance Florentine humanism. Building on her long-standing interest in the literary representation of space, Fazio’s work also examines the intersections of early modern Italian literature and science, focusing on how non-canonical figures shaped cultural understandings of the cosmos. She is currently preparing the first English translation and critical edition of a sixteenth-century poem that engages with Galileo’s discoveries. The edition is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in the Early Modern Literature, Science, and Medicine series.

Fazio is also completing her first book, Going the Distance: The Coherence of Tradition from Petrarch to Leopardi, which reflects her deep interest in how the early modern legacy is received and reimagined in modernity, and how this process shapes Italy’s sense of identity. Centered on the work of Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837)—widely regarded as Italy’s greatest poet after Dante and praised by Nietzsche as the quintessential modern poet-philosopher—the book foregrounds a largely overlooked aspect of Leopardi’s thought: his critical reflection on a culture that defines itself by reviving, rather than critically reexamining, its literary icons. Fazio explores how Leopardi grappled with this legacy, seeking to reshape the idea of an “Italian” intellectual tradition by engaging in dialogue with three key predecessors—Francesco Petrarca, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Giambattista Vico—each of whom offered a different model for confronting the past.

Her scholarship has been supported by the Renaissance Society of America, the Modern Language Association, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago Arts, Science and Culture Initiative Fellowship, and the National Library of Rome.