I work on Italian medieval and Renaissance literary culture, with a particular interest in the fourteenth-century author, Giovanni Boccaccio, and the way in which his works have been produced and read within Italy. As a book historian, I am interested in how the material presentation, paratexts, and page design of both manuscripts and early printed books can inform us about book producers (scribes, rubricators, illuminators, compositors, editors, publishers, printers etc), the contexts in which they worked, and their reading publics.

In 2021, I established Bristol Common Press with colleagues in English Studies as a working historical print shop and collaborative laboratory, in order to explore new methodologies for practice-based research within textual cultures and develop co-created projects which reach beyond academia.

My first monograph, Boccaccio and the Book: Production and Reading in Italy 1340-1520 (2009), pioneered the application of the study of the physical form and presentation of books to Boccaccio studies. I am co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio (2015), and co-editor of the forthcoming History of Poetry in Italy: 1200-1600 (CUP, 2025).

My current monograph project, Printing Boccaccio’s Lives: The Canonisation of a Vernacular Author, shows how life writing was used by editors and publishers working within the new and developing field of print culture to authorize a fourteenth-century author and build new audiences for vernacular texts.

I would be delighted to discuss proposals for postgraduate research projects in the fields of medieval and early modern Italian literature and culture, print culture, history of the book, and reception studies.

I work on Italian medieval and Renaissance literary culture, with a particular interest in the fourteenth-century author, Giovanni Boccaccio, and the way in which his works have been produced and read within Italy.

I co-direct Bristol Common Press.