Doctoral candidate in Italian Victoria Fanti was awarded the “Alexander Glass Humanity Institute Graduate Research Fellowship” for spring 2020, for her dissertation project The New Killer Queens of Italian Renaissance Tragedy.

Victoria’s dissertation studies how tragedians of the classical genre’s revival deployed new renderings of homicidal women during the Italian Renaissance. It argues that ‘new killer queens’ express genealogical anxieties bound to the fragmented political landscape of Renaissance Italy, exemplifying the threat posed by women who might sully the purity of dynastic lines by staining their own chastity and thereby condemning their progeny and begetting political chaos.