Biography

Ramie Targoff is the Jehuda Reinharz Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, and Co-Chair of Italian Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion (2001), John Donne, Body and Soul (2008); Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (2014), all from University of Chicago Press; Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2018), and the translator of Colonna’s 1538 Rime. Her latest book, Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance was published in 2024 by Alfred A. Knopf in NY, and Riverrun/Quercus Books in the UK; an Italian translation was published in 2025 by Mondadori.  She has recently received a multi-year grant from the NOMIS Foundation in Switzerland for her collaborative project, “Petrarch in Global Translation: A Genealogy of Western Love.”

Project Summary

In the past fifty or so years, the topic of love has faded away from the forefront of humanistic and literary scholarship: literary scholars and historians have focused on questions of gender and sexual identity, desire and pleasure, but since C.S. Lewis’s 1936 Allegory of Love and Denis Rougemont’s 1939 L’amour et l’Occident (both works interestingly written on the eve of World War II), there have been few ambitious and influential books on the topic of Western love from a literary point of view. This project attempts to rethink the ways in which love poetry for the last 600 or so years has been shaped by Francesco Petrarca’s Canzoniere, arguably the most influential book of love poetry written since the ancient world. In collaboration with twelve colleagues from across the globe, each working in their own native language, Targoff is translating—and through translating, rethinking—the impact of Petrarchism as a grammar of love.