Rachel Jacoff, Margaret E. Deffenbough and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature and Professor of Italian, Wellesley College

Rachel Jacoff received her B.A. in English with High Honors and Distinction in 1959 from Cornell University, an M.A. in English from Harvard in 1960 and the Ph.D. degree in Italian from Yale in 1977.

She has received fellowships from the NEH (1981-2, 1991-2), the Guggenheim Foundation (1993) and has been a fellow of the Bunting Institute, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies (villa I Tatti), the Stanford Humanities Center, the Rockerfeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni, and the Bogliasco Foundation's Liguria Study Center. She was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 1996-97. Professor Jacoff also served as an assistant editor of Speculum, The Journal of the Medieval Academy, and on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, the MLA Committee for the Teaching of Foreign Languages and Literature, and the Friends of the Harvard College Libraries. She has been a member of the faculty at Wellesley College since 1978.

Professor JacoffÕs major research interest is in Dante's Divine Comedy. Her current research concerns Dante's role in contemporary poetry, Dante and the visual arts, and the representation of the body in the Divine Comedy.

Select Bibliography:

"Re-reading 'Donna me prega, '" in Guido Cavalcanti tra I suoi lettori, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Florence: Edizioni Cadmo, 2003.

"Dante," (Descriptions of Isabella Stewart GardnerÕs collection of Dante books), in Eyes of the Beholder: Masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, ed. Alan Chong et al. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.

"John Flaxman," (Catalogue description of FlaxmanÕs drawings for the Divine Comedy), in A Private Passion: 19th-Century Paintings and Drawings from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, ed. Stephan Wolohojian. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003.

"Still Here: Dante After Modernism" (with Peter Hawkins), in Dante For the New Millenium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Story. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.

The Poets' Dante (with Peter Hawkins). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

"The Hermeneutics of Hunger," in Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V.A. Kolve. Pegasus Press, 2001.

"Our Bodies, Our Selves: The Body in the Commedia," in Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and its Afterlife. Essays in Honor of John Freccero. Brepols Press, 2000.

Editor and contributor. The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Co-editor and contributer. The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Editor and Introduction. Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (the essays of John Freccero). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.