Dr Alice Equestri is a Lecturer in English Literature, with a specialisation in the early modern period. She was a postdoc and adjunct lecturer at Padua in 2021-2022, and between 2017 and 2019 she held a position as EU Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sussex (UK). She also previously worked as a research fellow at the University of Venice Ca' Foscari. She has published two monographs: "Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law, and Medicine 1500-1640" (Routledge, 2021), and "The Fools of Shakespeare's Romances" (Carocci, 2016), which was awarded the AIA PhD Dissertation Prize 2015. Her essays have appeared or are due to appear in venues including "Studies in Philology", the "Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature", "Renaissance Studies", "Notes and Queries", "Disability Studies Quarterly" and "Cahiers Élisabéthains". She has written several book chapters and participated as speaker in international conferences in UK, US, Italy, France, Spain and Poland and was awarded a research internship at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2014. Her research interests include folly and intellectual disability in Early Modern English Literature, Robert Armin’s works, Shakespeare, and English translations or adaptations of Italian novellas.

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Monographs

• Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500-1640, Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, New York and London: Routledge (2021)
• “Armine…Thou art a foole and knaue”: The Fools of Shakespeare’s Romances, Rome: Carocci (2016). [winner of the AIA – Italian Association of English Studies PhD Prize 2015; reviewed by Matthew Steggle in Renaissance Studies 32 (2018, pp. 336-337) and Mario Martino in Memoria di Shakespeare (2018, pp. 187-191)]

Articles and essays

• ‘Translating the Law in the Inns of Court play Gismond of Salern’, Studies in Philology [in press]
• ‘Literature and Disability in the English Renaissance’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022 https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1317
• ‘Ben Jonson’, in ‘Renaissance Drama: Excluding Shakespeare’, in Year's Work in English Studies 100 (2021), pp. 43-51.
• ‘Shakespeare and the Construction of Intellectual Disability: The Case of Touchstone’, Disability Studies Quarterly 40.4 (2020) http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v40i4.6903
• ‘Ben Jonson’, in ‘Renaissance Drama: Excluding Shakespeare’, in Year's Work in English Studies 99 (2020), pp. 497-505.
• ‘”Rome’s Rich Ornament”: Lavinia, Commoditization, and the Senses in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, in Domenico Lovascio, ed., Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, Kalamazoo: MIP, 2020, pp. 19-38.
• ‘The First English Translation of Tomaso Garzoni’s L’Ospidale De’ Pazzi Incurabili: the Cultural Context and the Representation of Idiocy’, in Federica Masiero and Alessandra Petrina, eds, Acquisition through translation: Towards a Definition of Renaissance Translation, Turnhout: Brepols, 2020, pp. 267-285.
• ‘Wandering Fools and Foolish Vagrants: Folly on the Road in Early Modern English Culture’, in Lisa Hopkins and Bill Angus, eds, Reading the Road, from Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 127-145.
• ’This cold night will turn us all into fools and madmen’: Shakespeare’s Witty Fools and the Border between Idiocy and Mental Illness’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 99 (2019), pp. 23-32. [paper selected for publication by the ESRA Gdansk Conference committee 2017]
• ‘Ben Jonson’, in ‘Renaissance Drama: Excluding Shakespeare’, in Year's Work in English Studies 98 (2019), pp. 42-48.
• ‘”Trudge little letter, thou thinkest none yll go do thy dutie, all things to fulfill”: Writers and Readers in Early Modern Italianate Verse Narratives’, Cahiers Élisabéthains 97 (2018), pp. 20-38.
• ‘Unnatural Naturals? Changelings and Issues of Intellectual Disability in Early Modern English drama’, in Richard Hillman, ed., Theta XIII, Forms of the Supernatural on Stage: Evolution, Mutations (2018), pp. 211-229.
• ‘A New Suggestion for Robert Armin’s alias “Grumball”’, Notes and Queries 65 (2018), pp. 101-105.
• ‘The Italian Taylor and His Boy or What Robert Armin Did to Straparola’, Renaissance Studies 30 (2016), pp. 254-272.

Early Modern English Literature
Shakespeare and his contemporaries
Cultural history of intellectual disability and folly
Renaissance English translations of Italian novellas
Anglo-Italian relations in the early modern period
Law and literature
Literature and the history of science

I welcome dissertation projects on any aspect of Early Modern English literature and culture (c. 1500-1700) including, but not limited to:

Shakespeare and his contemporaries
Early Modern English drama, prose or poetry
Law or Science and literature
Disability or folly in early modern culture
Literature and politics/history
Anglo-Italian relations in the Renaissance
Renaissance travel writing

For organisation purposes, if you are interested in working on a dissertation project with me, please get in touch when you are ready to start, not earlier (e.g. max 5-6 months before your planned graduation date for 'tesi triennali'; or 8-9 months earlier for 'tesi magistrali' – unless you have special requirements).