David Lummus on Mythology

David Lummus is currently Assistant Professor of Italian Literature at Stanford University. Prof. Lummus specializes in late medieval and early modern Italian literature and intellectual history. His research and teaching interests include fourteenth-century literature in Latin and the vernacular, Renaissance Humanism, medieval and early modern mythography, and the pastoral tradition. He explores critical approaches such as reception theory and actor-network theory, and has experience in literary translation, especially of contemporary Italian poetry. He has written on Giovanni Boccaccio, Francesco Petrarca, Dante Alighieri, Albertino Mussato, and Edoardo Sanguineti, and he is currently completing his first book, The City of Poetry: Politics and Poetics in Pre-Humanist Italy, which addresses the nature of the humanist revival of the classical past by examining the political function of the proto-humanist defense of poetry. His book focuses on the ways in which fourteenth-century theories and practices of poetry engaged with municipal political practices and universal theories of political organization, in the works of Albertino Mussato, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Coluccio Salutati. Between 2008-2012, he was Assistant Professor of Italian at Yale University, and in 2009-2010 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame. He was elected to the Modern Language Association's Executive Committee for Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature, on which he will serve between 2014-2018.