Heather Webb

Heather Webb joins the FAS as Professor of Italian Studies. She previously taught at the University of Cambridge and was Director of Italian at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. She was Assistant and then Associate Professor of Italian at The Ohio State University from 2004 to 2011. She received her doctorate from Stanford University. She is the author of The Medieval Heart (Yale, 2010), Dante’s Persons: An Ethics of the Transhuman (OUP, 2016), translated as L’idea di persona in Dante, Corpo e identità, trans. Paolo Rigo (tab edizioni, 2023), and Dante, Artist of Gesture (OUP, 2022). With George Corbett, she edited Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy, in 3 vols. (Open Book Publishers, 2015-17). Most recently, with Zygmunt Baranski she edited Dante’s “Vita nova”: A Collaborative Reading (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023). She is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Affective Communities in Premodern Italy.