A warm welcome to Professor Arielle Saiber, new Head of the Italian section and Director of Italian Graduate Studies.

Saiber received her Ph.D. in Italian Literature at Yale University. She publishes on medieval and early modern Italian literature, mathematics, science, and print history; Dante and Dante reception in the arts; experimental electronic music; and science fiction. Her books include Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language (Routledge, 2005) and Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (Toronto, 2017); and the co-edited anthology Images of Quattrocento Florence: Writings on Literature, History and Art (Yale, 2000). She has co-edited special issues of Configurations (“Mathematics and the Imagination,” 2009), Dante Studies (“Dante and Longfellow,” 2011), California Italian Studies (“Italian Sound,” 2014), and Science Fiction Studies (“Italian Science Fiction,” 2015).  She is co-editing an anthology in English of Italian science fiction for Wesleyan University Press.  She founded the web archive, Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante in Contemporary Culture in 2006, which she continues to co-edit. Saiber has been a fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, as well as receiving an NEH for her research. She has served on the executive councils of the Dante Society of America, the Modern Language Association, and the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. She won Yale’s Field Prize for the best work of “poetry, literature, or religion” at Yale in 1999 for her dissertation on Bruno; the Karfosky Prize for teaching at Bowdoin (2004); and the MLA’s Scaglione Publication Prize (2016), the Newbery Library’s Weiss-Brown Publication Award (2017), The Bridge Book Award from the American Initiative for Italian Culture (2018), and the Kendrick Book Prize from the Society of Literature, Science, and the Arts (2019) for Measured Words.  She is currently working on the concept of ‘allomorphosis’ in Italian humanist writing, as well as a study on Inf. 24 and thing theory.