Biography

Thomas Patrick Wisniewski is a literary scholar and translator. Currently he is a Research Associate of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he serves on the graduate faculty of the Writing & Literature Master’s Program in Harvard Summer & Extension School. Previously a Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (2020-2024), he launched the Ph.D. Secondary Field in Translation Studies with a recurring graduate seminar on literary translation. He has also held visiting lectureships at Boston University and Tufts. He holds an A.M. from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard. His publications have appeared in Biography, World Literature Today, Gradiva, Italica, Italian Culture, In Other Words, L’anello che non tiene, Forum Italicum, Quaderni d’italianistica, and Music & Literature. His postdoctoral work was awarded a research grant from Harvard’s Provostial Fund for the Arts & Humanities, an Elson Family Arts Grant, and a Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Postdoctoral Writing Fellowship. His previous research was supported by the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, the Krupp Foundation Research Fellowship, the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, and the Global Humanities Junior Fellowship at Freie Universität Berlin.

Project Summary

How has Il Principe shaped, and been shaped in, translation from its earliest translators to its most recent? That Machiavelli’s work of political philosophy has had such an impact on fields outside the genre of mirrors for princes has commonly led scholars to study this treatise both in the original and in translation. To that end, this project examines the history of the transnational reception of Il Principe by reframing a range of translations of the original text that circulated in and outside of Italy since its first printing in 1532, five years after the author’s death. In recasting a seminal text as a case study in the practice, history, and theory of translation, this project shifts scholarly emphasis from political theory to world literature and translation studies. To emphasize the value of a multiplicity of translations, this study aims to show how a single text may traverse literary, historical, and political discourses well beyond the readership of the original and its intended audience: a handbook for new and inexperienced rulers anxious about holding onto their precarious power, made ever the more memorable by the author’s witty maxims and epigrams. Translation, then, takes on a triple meaning: of language; of ideas; and of time.