Tristan Kay

I specialize in the literature and culture of the Italian Middle Ages, particularly the work of Dante, and its resonances in the modern world. I am currently Head of Subject in the Department of Italian and I co-direct Bristol's interdisciplinary Centre for Medieval Studies. I am a general editor of The Italianist, one of the leading international journals of Italian studies. My first book and several of my early articles focused on Dante’s conception of love and his sophisticated dialogue with other medieval vernacular writers. My monograph, Dante’s Lyric Redemption: Eros, Salvation, Vernacular Tradition, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. The book provides a re-evaluation of Dante’s relationship to his vernacular lyric heritage (both Italian and Occitan) and highlights his commitment to eros as a redemptive force. In addition, I have published a number of articles that examine from different perspectives Dante’s complex and evolving notion of desire, in relation to both medieval and classical literary cultures. I am also interested in Dante and medieval political culture, and wrote the chapter on 'Politics' in the 2021 Oxford Handbook of Dante. I have contributed to other important recent publications and collaborations in the field, such as the Cambridge Companion to Dante's 'Commedia'; Vertical Readings in Dante's 'Commedia'; and Dante's 'Vita Nova': A Collaborative Reading, and am the co-editor of two books on the poet. While I have continued to research and publish on Dante and medieval culture, I have a growing interest in the poet’s modern reception and especially his status as a political icon. In 2020 I received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to support work on a second major book project, ‘The Poet and the Nation: Dante and the Idea of Italy’. As Italy today adopts a more nationalist brand of politics, my project explores the ways in which the figure of Dante has been used and exploited to construct and articulate different forms of Italian national identity since the process of unification in the nineteenth century. Through different phases of modern Italian history, cultural and political agents have appropriated and manipulated Dante’s work to promote and legitimize their different visions of the nation. My project interrogates this longstanding ‘national’ appropriation of Dante, with a particular focus on the centenary celebrations of May 1865; the cult of Dante under fascism; and the poet's place in contemporary political discourse. In so doing, the project offers a broader meditation upon the problems associated with viewing Dante (and medieval culture more broadly) through a national lens, and upon the potency and persistence of this image of the poet. More recently, the project has been supported through a Italian Studies Reseearch Award at the University of Notre Dame. Away from the monograph itself, which remains in progress, my recent work in the field of Dante reception includes essays on Dante and ideas of transnationalism; an article and a co-edited themed journal section on Dante centenaries and their social, political, and cultural functions; and a major article on the use of Dante as an expressive model in the Holocaust writing of Primo Levi. Details of these and other publications can be found below. I am always interested to hear from prospective research students and postdoctoral researchers who are interested in working on projects related to my areas of expertise. I currently co-supervise three PhD projects: Elizabeth Bratton, ‘Dante’s Paradiso as Inquiry: A Medieval Literary History of Scientific Imagining’: PhD Thesis funded by University of Bristol Research Scholarship (with Rhiannon Daniels, since 2025); Sara Madoré, ‘Discourses of Love and Marriage: Gautier d’Arras and Chrétien de Troyes’: PhD Thesis (with Ad Putter, since 2025); Francesca Sartori, ‘Gender, Genre and Geography: Dante’s Italy through the eyes of Victorian women writers’: PhD Thesis funded by University of Bristol Research Scholarship (with Samantha Matthews, since 2024). I have co-supervised four other PhD projects through to completion during my time at Bristol.

[2023] 'Dante e l’Italia sono la stessa cosa': Poet and Nation in the Centenary Years of 1865 and 2021, Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies, 6 (2023), 208-29 [2023] Looking Back to Look Forward: Dante Centenaries, Then and Now (with Federica Coluzzi), Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies, 6 (2023), 200-7 [2023] Vita nova XIX–XXIV [10.12–15.11]: A New and More Noble Theme, in Dante’s 'Vita nova': A Collaborative Reading, ed. by Z. G. Barański and H. Webb (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2023), pp. 157-69 [2024] From Isolation to Integration: Political Themes in Anglophone Dante Scholarship (1945-2021), in Now Feed Yourself: Anglo-American and Italian Scholarship on Dante, ed. by Z. G. Barański, T. Cachey Jr, and A. Pegoretti (Oxford: Legenda, 2024), pp. 281-96