Meredith Ray's research focuses on early modern Italian literature and culture and on the intersections between gender, literature, and the history of science. Her books include Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (winner of the American Association for Italian Studies book prize); Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Honorable Mention), Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy , and Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Italian Renaissance . She has also published widely on the seventeenth-century Venetian nun and early feminist author Arcangela Tarabotti, early modern convent culture, and epistolary writing. She has co-edited a number of Tarabotti’s works, including Convent Paradise and Lettere familiari e di complimento /Letters Familiar and Formal (with Lynn Westwater), and Inferno monacale (with Elissa Weaver and Lynn Westwater). Her current projects include a monograph exploring women’s engagement with natural philosophy in early modern Italy, and a study of Galileo and his female correspondents.

Professor Ray is a founding co-editor of the Early Modern Exchange series at the University of Delaware Press and a recent guest editor of a special focus of Galilæana dedicated to women’s voices in Renaissance and early modern scientific culture. She is a past President of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women & Gender. Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Renaissance Society of America, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the J. William Fulbright Foundation, and others.

Before joining MLL, Meredith Ray was the Elias Ahuja Professor of Italian at the University of Delaware with a joint appointment in Women & Gender Studies, and served as Interim Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures from 2019-2022. She received her M.A. in Italian from Middlebury College and her Ph.D. in Italian Literature from the University of Chicago.