This fall, doctoral student Jessica Apolloni was chosen to be one of ten participants in an inaugural fellowship from the Academy for Advanced Study in the Renaissance (another doctoral candidate, Caitlin McHugh, also was selected). The fellows will spend five weeks next spring working with a distinguished group of senior Renaissance scholars, first in Oxford, England, then in Rome, and finally Chicago. Each receives a stipend of $10,000 in addition to room, board, and airfare. Apolloni, who received her BA in English at Minnesota, also won a fellowship in her first year of doctoral studies--a Fulbright to spend a semester in Italy. It was then she developed a fascination with early modern stories of criminal activity, which is now the subject of her dissertation. Read on.1. You received your BA in English (as well as in Italian and Global Studies) here at the U. What made you want to stick around?
As an undergraduate, I had a lot of different intellectual interests that aligned well with my passion for reading and thinking about texts. When I considered graduate school, the literature department was where I felt I could still pursue all of those other interests by analyzing anything from translation theory to global economics in a given text. I was also inspired by the wonderful faculty in the English department and knew this would be a supportive environment for the PhD. The classes that I took in every subfield, from African Cinema with Charlie Sugnet to North American Imperialisms with Jani Scandura, exemplified our faculty's dedication to their own work as well as student development.
In terms of my particular subfield, I took an honors Shakespeare course with Shirley Nelson Garner that was influential in focusing my interests in early modern English-Italian relations. Above all, whenever I would mention my research interests to faculty, even faculty members from quite separate departments, they would tell me I really needed to work with John Watkins--and that has proven to be absolutely true. I couldn't imagine having a better adviser for my project, so I had to stay at the U!
2. How did your first year Fulbright study in Italy for a semester influence your studies since?
I received the Fulbright grant at a perfect time, as I had just completed one semester of graduate coursework and was still in the process of narrowing down my academic interests. Outside of my teaching responsibilities, I was able to explore numerous archives, including the Vatican Library. I became fascinated with criminal accounts and procedures, ranging from descriptions of local bar brawls to intellectual discussions of crime in letters from the powerful Medici family. Having the time to investigate a range of materials is how I discovered and developed my dissertation topic on Italian criminal narratives circulating in England. In the process, I learned a lot from the group of Fulbright grantees residing in Rome--including how to navigate the difficulties of working in Italian archives.
3. More, please, about your dissertation project?
My dissertation is focused on accounts of criminality in Renaissance Italy that are then translated and transformed into an English context. The working title is "Dialogues of Violence: Intertextual Community Conflict in Early Modern English and Italian Criminal Narratives." The project is centered on community conflicts stemming from legal practices, and I aim for it to be an innovative understanding of the development and expansion of legal systems. In the process, I hope to rethink our understanding of Renaissance law using interdisciplinary methods, especially those derived from literary, legal, and cultural studies. The specific Italian texts I am focusing on include Italian novelle and news pamphlets or avvisi, which contain detailed accounts of criminal activity and are perhaps the earliest form of communicating crime to a wider audience. These Italian texts are then translated into the English literary milieu and end up on the "Italianate" English stage from playwrights like Shakespeare and Webster. Tracing this intertextual dialogue will provide insights into the ways ideas on crime communicate across geographical, political, and cultural barriers.
4. Can you give an example of a "crime narrative" you find fascinating?
My first dissertation chapter is on judicial authority in Italian novelle, so I spent the summer reading through hundreds of these fantastic short stories from the 14th and 15th centuries. One of my favorites is in a novella collection from Franco Sacchetti, who was actually also a head judge in multiple Italian comuni. In the tale, a man from Florence is invited to be the head judge of a small, unruly territory. He immediately faces a case where the community is heavily divided, and he is afraid to take sides, saying to himself that he did not come to this place to die. After he fails in his attempt to have the two sides come to their own agreement, he ends up fleeing the city. Novelle like this illustrate the difficult position judges would be in as both influential insiders and vulnerable outsiders to a given community. What's more, it paints a captivating picture of judicial authority that is difficult to locate in legal documents such as court cases or decrees.
5. Congratulations on receiving the fellowship with the Academy for Advanced Study in the Renaissance. What are your hopes for the experience?
One of the main reasons I applied to the Academy was to work closely with the two professors running the seminar, Edward Muir and Regina Schwartz. Muir is an incredible legal historian who specifically works on crimes like vendetta in Italy. Schwartz works on legal concerns from a more theoretical perspective, and I am eager to see how her insights might shape the way I approach legal texts. In addition, I am excited to work with the interdisciplinary cohort of graduate students in our seminars. Lastly, the stipend provided will allow me to dedicate a semester to dissertation work as well as carry out a short research trip this summer to conduct archival research on legal documents in Italy.
