Jane Tylus

About

Jane Tylus is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her specialization lies in late medieval and early modern European literature and culture, with secondary interests in 19th-20th century fiction. Her work often addresses multiple national traditions through various genres such as epic, lyric, pastoral, and the letter, as well as through theoretical models like representations of the other and translation, or historical issues including religious crisis, female literacy, and the conquest of the New World. Tylus emphasizes creating inquiry spaces centered on works that are often ambiguously interpreted, with a focus on recovering and interrogating marginalized voices, including historical personages, dialects, minor characters, and the foreign in periods of heightened nationalism and linguistic boundaries. Her recent courses have covered medieval women’s writings, translation theory and history, representations of rural life from antiquity to the present, and detective fiction. Her current book project explores the ritual of departure in early modernity, particularly how writers and artists send their works into the world. Prior to her current position, she taught at NYU in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature, where she was the founding faculty director of the Humanities Initiative, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been the General Editor for the journal I Tatti Studies in the…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Art history
• Art
• History
• Philosophy
• Classics
• Literature
• World Wide Web
• Library science

Selected publications

• Who Owns Literature?

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-01-09 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Interest in material culture has produced a rigorous body of scholarship that considers the dynamics of licensing, permissions, and patronage - an ongoing history of the estrangement of works from their authors. Additionally, translation studies is enabling new ways to think about the emergence of European vernaculars and the reappropriation of classical and early Christian texts. This Element emerges from these intersecting stories. How did early modern authors say goodbye to their works; how d…

  PublisherDOI

• (Dis)placing the foreign in early modern Europe: The example of Tasso's <i>Gierusalemme</i>

  Forum Italicum A Journal of Italian Studies · 2023-05-18 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Torquato Tasso, Italy's foremost early modern poet, engaged with issues of otherness throughout his complicated life and career—in no small part because of his own itinerant and often marginalized status. His first try at what would eventually become his monumental Gerusalemme liberata—an unfinished poem he wrote when he was 16, called simply “Il Gierusalemme”—gives us a glimpse into an early attempt to define epic as a space for welcoming in the stranger. The stranger was as much a character fo…

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Cross-Dressing Technologies of Mobility, Trauma, and Freedom

  Renaissance Drama · 2022-09-01 · 1 citations

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• Women Writers and the “Male” Canon

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-01-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter explores the roles and recognition of women in Italian literary history, examining how female authors have contributed to, reshaped, and often contested the traditionally male-dominated literary canon. Dacia Maraini amplifies overlooked voices in Chiara di Assisi (2014) by recounting Saint Clare’s defiant life through a contemporary lens, challenging readers to question who decides canonical worth. Italian writers from the Renaissance onward, like Gaspara Stampa, boldly rei…

  PublisherDOI

• :<i>A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy: The Life of Clare of Rimini.</i>

  Sixteenth Century Journal · 2024-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Dacia Maraini

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  4 shared

• Margaret H. Beissinger

  Princeton University

  3 shared

• Susanne Lindgren Wofford

  3 shared

• Gaspara Stampa

  3 shared

• Troy Tower

  3 shared

• Karen Newman

  John Brown University

  3 shared

• Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici

  2 shared

• Norma Thompson

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Translation Award from the Society for the Study of Early Mo…
• Howard Marraro Prize for Outstanding Work in Italian Studies…

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