Janet Smarr

office: Galbraith Hall 225
email: jsmarr@ucsd.edu

Biography

JANET LEVARIE SMARR (Ph.D., Princeton University), head of the Ph.D. program, received her doctorate in Comparative Literature with a special focus on the Renaissance. After a year at Harvard as a Mellon Faculty Fellow, she taught for twenty years in the Comparative Literature and Italian Programs at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign before moving to UCSD. Her publications include: Italian Renaissance Tales (winner of the American Assoc. of Italian Studies Best Translation Award), Boccaccio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover, Boccaccio's Eclogues, and Joining the Conversation: Renaissance Dialogues by Women, along with dozens of articles on Italian writers of the 14th-17th centuries, relations between Renaissance writing and the Latin classics, and French and Italian women's writing in the 16th century. She has edited or coedited volumes of essays on Historical Criticism and the Challenge of Theory and Italian Women and the City, and has served on the editorial boards of the journals Italian Culture and Italica. She currently teaches seminars on Italian comedy, madness in Renaissance culture and drama, and women in European theatre before 1700. She is also part of the intedepartmental Italian Studies Program.