After graduating summa cum laude from the University of Rome ''La Sapienza'' with a thesis on Luigi Pirandello, Laura Benedetti moved to the University of Alberta, where sub-freezing temperatures helped her concentrate on the theme of the garden in Renaissance chivalric poems, which happened to be the topic of her M.A. thesis. From then on, her interests in Renaissance and contemporary culture have fostered each other, leading to a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University and to eight years as a junior faculty at Harvard University, where she became the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities. She joined Georgetown University in 2002 as the first Laura and Gaetano De Sole Professor of Contemporary Italian Culture, and served as the Italian Department Chair from 2009 to 2015 and again from 2022 to the present, as well as the director of the L’Aquila Community Based Learning Summer Program, which combined advanced language and culture learning and volunteer work. She is currently Book Review Editor of Italian Culture, the official journal of the American Association of Italian Studies.
Professor Benedetti’s publications include a monograph on Torquato Tasso (La sconfitta di Diana. Un percorso per la «Gerusalemme liberata», 1997), two volumes of conference proceedings (Gendered Contexts: New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies'', 1996, in collaboration with Julia Hairston and Silvia Ross; Nascere, rinascere, ricominciare: immagini del nuovo inizio nella cultura italiana, 2017, in collaboration with Gianluigi Simonetti), and the edition of a Renaissance treatise (Giovambattista Giraldi Cinzio, Discorso dei romanzi, 1999, in collaboration with Enrico Musacchio and Giuseppe Monorchio). Published in 2007, her volume The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in 20th-Century Italy (winner of the 2008 Flaiano International Prize for Italian Studies) analyzes the evolving notion of motherhood in 20th-century Italy, as reflected in and shaped by literature. Her 2012 translation of Lucrezia Marinella’s Esortazioni alle donne e agli altri se a loro saranno a grado (Exhortations to Women and to Others if They Please), complete with an introduction and over five hundred notes, is the first modern edition of Lucrezia Marinella’s important and very rare work, which has survived in only three copies and had never been republished after its first edition in 1645. Her latest book, From Venice to Cairo: il viaggio di Zaccaria Pagani nel primo Cinquecento (https://www.poligrafo.it/da-venezia-al-cairo), focuses on a manuscript written by Zaccaria Pagani in 1512. This enticing travelogue contains a wealth of information about sailing techniques, daily practices, psychological traits, and official protocols, and provides evidence of the commercial, diplomatic and cultural ties that have linked populations across the Mediterranean throughout the centuries.
In 2015, Laura Benedetti published her first novel, Un paese di carta, that traces the story of three generations of women between Italy and the U.S. An English version–rather than a translation–came out in 2022 under the title A Country of Paper. Her second novel, Secondo piano, is a thriller that takes place on the campus of an imaginary American university and deals with the role of the humanities in the current academic and political environment.
Laura Benedetti is also the author of over seventy articles that span seven hundred years, from Dante to Elena Ferrante, and tackle topics as diverse as the fictional treatment of historical figures (''Reconstructing Artemisia: Twentieth-Century Images of a Woman Artist;'' ''L'amante di Orazio impazzì per Eleonora: avventure e sventure del personaggio Tasso attraverso i secoli''), intertextuality in the Renaissance (''Virtú femminile o virtú donnesca? Torquato Tasso, Lucrezia Marinella ed una polemica rinascimentale,'' ''Atlante, o i paradossi dell’amore,'' ''La «vis abdita» della «Liberata» e i suoi esiti nella «Conquistata»,'' ''Giardini di piacere e di pericolo''), and the representation of women (''I silenzi di Alatiel,'' ''Vivere o essere vissuti: Amalia in Svevo’s «Senilità»,'' ''Il linguaggio dell'amicizia e della città: L'amica geniale di Elena Ferrante tra continuità e cambiamento''), as well as issues of narrative strategies and construction (''I riflessi di sé nelle storie degli altri: su alcuni sdoppiamenti sveviani''). From 2000 to 2009, Laura Benedetti authored the entry on Italian literature for the Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year. She has been a guest on the RAI (Italian Public Television), The Diane Rehm Show and the Diane Rehm Book Club, and has delivered lectures at major universities and cultural venues in Europe and North America, as well as Egypt and Japan.
Laura Benedetti is the recipient of the Flaiano International Prize (2008), the “Wise Woman” award from the National Organization of Italian American Women (2014) and the Gold Medal from the Federazione Associazioni Abruzzesi U.S.A. (2015), and was Guest of Honor at the Women's Caucus of the American Association of Italian Studies (2016). In 2018, the Regione Abruzzo appointed her ''Ambasciatore d'Abruzzo nel mondo,'' a title conferred upon people of Abruzzese origin who have distinguished themselves abroad. She has received fellowships from Georgetown University, the Renaissance Society of America, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Delmas Foundation.
Academic Appointment(s)
- Secondary
- Department Chair, College - Department of Italian