Eva Del Soldato is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and currently the Andrew Mellon Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She was trained in Philosophy and Intellectual History at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Her research is primarily devoted to Renaissance thought and culture, and she is completing a monograph tentatively entitled Geographies of Lovesickness. She is the author of the monographs Simone Porzio (2010) and Early Modern Aristotle: On the Making and Unmaking of Authority (2020). She has co-edited the volumes City, Court, Academy. Language Choice in Early Modern Italy (2017), Harmony and Contrast. Plato and Aristotle in the Early Modern Period (2022), and Teaching Plato in Italian Renaissance Universities (2024). A former Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Warwick, she received fellowships from Villa I Tatti, the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, and the Huntington Library in Pasadena, among others. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Milan and at the University of Bergamo, and the 2022/2023 Charles Speroni Chair at UCLA.
How has your time in Rome shaped or shifted the direction of your project so far?
Access to documents and resources held in Roman libraries and archives enabled me to complete my research and confirm the validity of the project's main thesis. The kindness of librarians and archivists at the Biblioteca Casanatense, the Biblioteca Alessandrina, and the Archive of the Dicastero per la Dottrina della Fede revealed to me incredible treasures that challenged me every day to reconsider the complexity of seventeenth-century medical culture. The support of the librarians at the American Academy was equally invaluable.
What part of your daily routine or environment at the Academy has most influenced you and your work?
The constant dialogue with other fellows, both scholars and artists, invited me to enlarge my horizons and brought new and unexpected questions to the documents I was analyzing. The lunches and the dinners were a moment to enjoy amazing food, but mostly to have engrossing conversations.
What are you hoping to explore or deepen in the remaining months of your residency?
The beauty of research is that it never ends! I am currently making new discoveries at the Archivio di Stato, thanks to the suggestions of brilliant Roman scholars I had a chance to meet during my residency, and I am also taking advantage of the incredible American Academy library.