Prof Simon Gilson FBA

Background

Simon Gilson studied Italian and French at Leeds University and took his PhD in Italian Literature at Cambridge University. He was lecturer in Italian at Leeds University (1998-99), and was Professor of Italian (2010-17) at Warwick University, where he served as Chair of Italian (2006-09), Chair of the Sub-Faculty of Modern Languages (2012-14) and Chair of the Arts Faculty (2015-17). He has also taught at the Universities of Birmingham, Royal Holloway and at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. He was the joint Senior Editor of the journal Italian Studies (2011-16) and has been an elected a council member of the Dante Society of America, Harvard (2005-07). He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.

Teaching

Simon Gilson teaches Italian literature and cultural history c. 1250-c.1600.

Research

Gilson’s research is focused on Dante, the reception of Dante, and Renaissance Italian literary, cultural and intellectual history. He has been involved in several collaborative funded research projects in the fields of medieval and Renaissance studies. He is currently the General Editor of the monograph series ‘Italian Perspectives’ (Legenda, 2011-), and a nominated honorary member of the Italian Dante Society in Florence (2008-). He was the Chair of the Society for Italian Studies between 2018 and 2024. From September 2024 he holds a 3-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to work on a project entitled ‘Reading, Interpreting and Printing Petrarch in Early Modern Italy, 1470-1650’.

Selected publications

• (ed. with Pierpaolo Antonello) Science and Literature in Italian Culture From Dante to Calvino (Oxford: Legenda, 2004)
• Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
• (ed. with Fabrizio De Donno) Beyond Catholicism: Heresy, Mysticism and Apocalypse in Italian Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2014)
• (ed. with Jill Kraye and Luca Bianchi) Vernacular Aristotelianism in Italy from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries (London: The Warburg Institute, 2017)
• Reading Dante in Renaissance Italy: Florence, Venice and the ‘Divine Poet’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)