Faculty

Hairston, Julia

About

Julia L. Hairston teaches courses in Italian literature at Loyola's John Felice Rome Center. Her research focuses on the intersection of literature and history in the Italian Renaissance, primarily as regards gender. She has published articles on Machiavelli, Ariosto, Leon Battista Alberti, and Tullia d’Aragona and co-edited two collections of essays, one devoted to gender issues in Italian culture (Peter Lang, 1996) and the other to the body in early modern Italy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Hers is a bilingual edition of the poems and letters of Tullia d’Aragona (CRRS & Iter, 2014) and a cluster of essays on gender in early modern Rome in a 2014 issue of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Hairston has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. She has recently co-edited a bilingual edition of d’Aragona’s The Wretch, Otherwise Known as Guerrino (forthcoming from Iter Press in 2023 or 2024). Currently, she is co-editing a volume on women as readers in early modern Italy and writing an intellectual biography on the sixteenth-century woman writer Tullia d’Aragona.  

Degrees

• BA, Italian, Vassar College 
• Laurea, Contemporary Italian Literature, Sapienza University of Rome 
• MA and PhD, Italian Studies, The Johns Hopkins University 

Research Interests

• Italian Renaissance literature, particularly Italian women’s writing
• early modern history and literature, specifically as regards gender