Lina Bolzoni received her PhD from Scuola Normale Superiore; she taught at University of Pisa and from 1997 she holds the position of the professor of Italian Literature at Scuola Normale Superiore; in 1998-2001 she was Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the SNS.
She was a visiting professor in various foreign universities, among which Harvard, UCLA, New York University, Collège de France, École Normale Supérieure; she was also a visiting scholar at Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles (California), and a visiting fellow at Christ Church College, All Souls College e Keble College, Oxford.
At the Scuola Normale Superiore she is a founding director of the Centre for Data Processing of Texts and Images in Literary Tradition. (www.ctl.sns.it)
In 1989 she curated the introductory part of the exhibition “La fabbrica del pensiero. Dall’arte della memoria alle neuroscienze” (1989, Florence, Forte Belvedere; 1990 Paris, Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie), and in 2012-2013 she was the curator of an art exhibition organized in Pisa “Donne e cavalieri, incanti, follia. Viaggio attraverso le immagini dell’Orlando Furioso”.
Her research activity regards the relationships between literature and philosophy in the Cinquecento and the Seicento (including studies on Tommaso Campanella, Francesco Patrizi of Cherso and the utopian literature); sacred and profane oratory, chivalric romance; art of memory; portrait within the poetic and figurative tradition; tradition of reading as a form of contact and dialogue with the authors.
She is the author of numerous monographs, including: La stanza della memoria(Torino, Einaudi, 1995 – The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press (2001), which was translated in various languages; La rete delle immagini. Predicazione in volgare dalle origini a Bernardino da Siena (Torino, Einaudi, 2002) translated in English – The Web of Images: Vernacular Preaching from Its Origins to St. Bernardino da Siena (2004);Poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento, (Bari, Laterza, 2008); Il cuore di cristallo. Ragionamenti d’amore, poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento (Torino, Einaudi, 2010) and Il lettore creativo. Percorsi cinquecenteschi fra memoria, gioco, scrittura (Napoli, Guida, 2012).
She has been awarded numerous scientific prizes, among which: Premio Viareggo, Premio Brancati-Zafferana Etnea, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for an Outstanding Scholarly Work in the Field of Italian Studies assigned by the Modern Language Association of America.
She was made an honorary member of the Modern Language Association of America and the American Philosophical Society; associé étranger of the Académie des incriptions et belles lettres in Paris and national member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
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