Arielle Saiber

Arielle Saiber (she/her/hers)

Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies, Head of the Italian Subdivision

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Research Interests: Dante, Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Humanism, Early Print History, History of Science and Mathematics, Science Fiction, Electronic Music, Mysticism, Psychedelic Studies

Education: PhD, Yale University

Modern Languages and Literatures > People > Arielle Saiber

Arielle Saiber is Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. 

Saiber's books include Images of Quattrocento Florence: Writings on Literature, History and Art co-edited with Stefano U. Baldassarri (Yale, 2000); Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language (Ashgate/Routledge, 2005); and Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2017).

Saiber publishes primarily on Dante, on the intersections between premodern Italian literature and mathematics/science, and visual interpretations of Dante’s Commedia.  She has also published on early print history, science fiction, and experimental electronic music.  Her current research is on “altered states of consciousness” in medieval and Renaissance Italian literature.

She has co-edited a number of special issues of academic journals: for Configurations, “Mathematics and the Imagination” (2009) with Henry S. Turner; for Dante Studies, “Longfellow and Dante” (2010) with Giuseppe Mazzotta; for California Italian Studies, “Sound” (2014) with Deanna Shemek; and for Science Fiction Studies, “Italian Science Fiction” (2015) with Salvatore Proietti and Umberto Rossi.  She is currently co-editing with Proietti an anthology of Italian science fiction in English for Wesleyan University Press's Early Classics of Science Fiction series.

Her doctoral dissertation on Giordano Bruno won Yale’s Field Prize (2000), and in 2004 she received the Karofsky Prize for teaching at Bowdoin.  She has been a fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples, Italy (1998-1999), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2003-2004), and Villa I Tatti - Harvard’s Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy (2008-2009).  She also received an NEH Fellowship (2008-2009), the MLA's Scaglione Publication Award (2016), the Newberry Library's Weiss-Brown Publication Award (2017), the American Initiative for Italian Culture's Bridge Book Award (2018), and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts' Kendrick Book Prize (2019) for her book Measured Words. 

In 2006 she built the web-based archive, Dante Today: Sightings and Citings of Dante’s Work in Contemporary Culture, which she now co-edits with Beth Coggeshall.

She co-edits the new book series Proximities: Experiments in Nearness with David Cecchetto for the University of Minnesota Press.