Eugenio Refini

My research focuses on reception, translation and forms of adaptation, which I explore through the intersections of rhetoric, poetics, drama, music and voice studies. My first monograph, Per via d’annotationi (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 2009), looks at the Renaissance reception of Horace’s Art of Poetry as a seminal moment in the making of early modern literary theory. My second book, The Vernacular Aristotle: Translation as Reception in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), discusses the vernacular appropriation of Aristotle as a lens through which to reassess the place of translation within any process of reception. Similar questions inform my publications on the reception of the “sublime” in rhetoric, poetics and music. My third monograph, Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy (Oxford: MHRA - Legenda, 2023) explores pedagogical uses of dramatic allegories in Italy around 1600, with a focus on the place of theatre in the education of female orphans in the hospitals of Venice. I am currently working on a book project entitled Ariadne’s Echo: Voice, Memory, and the Performance of Reception, which examines the reception of Ariadne’s lament across music and poetry between 1600 and 1900.

Prior to joining NYU, I was an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Johns Hopkins University. I have been research fellow at the University Warwick, Ahmanson fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti, as well as the recipient of research fellowships from the ENS Paris, the University of Geneva, the Harry Ransom Research Center, the Bodleian Library and the Warburg Institute. I have been awarded the NEH Rome Prize in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies from the American Academy in Rome (FAAR 22).