Filippo Naitana
Associate Professor of Modern Languages
Filippo Naitana specializes in Italian intellectual history and its intersections with literature and material culture. He graduated with a laurea in history from the Università degli Studi di Firenze (Florence, Italy) and received a Ph.D. in Italian literature from Yale University.
His scholarly interests include Dante and the classical tradition and the Renaissance in a Mediterranean context, and his research has been published in journals such as “Archivio storico italiano”, “Dante Studies”, “Quaderni Medievali”, and “Italian Poetry Review- IPR”. Naitana is also a bilingual poet and literary translator whose work has been featured on both sides of the Atlantic in venues such as “The Massachusetts Review”, “Journal of Italian Translation”, “La Repubblica”, “Levania”, “nuoviargomenti.net”, and the multilingual volume Writers Between Worlds – Scrittori fra più mondi. In 2021, Viceversa—his first single-author collection of poetry—appeared in the Ungarettiana series published by Società Editrice Fiorentina.
As director of the Italian program, Dr. Naitana has developed a curriculum that brings the Italian humanistic tradition into dialogue with contemporary global concerns and created experiential learning opportunities that put students’ interdisciplinary interests and preparation to work in real-world settings.