Joseph Luzzi

Joseph Luzzi (PhD Yale) is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College and the author of nine books, including the recent The Innocents of Florence: The Renaissance Rediscovery of Childhood (Norton, 2025) and Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance (Norton, 2022). Both were New Yorker Best Books of the Year selections, and Botticelli’s Secret was also shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. Other books include Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale University Press, 2008), which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), a finalist for the international prize “The Bridge Book” Award; My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (HarperCollins, 2015), which has been translated into multiple languages. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TLS, and American Scholar, among others, and his media appearances include a profile in the Guardian and an interview with National Public Radio. Among his honors are a Dante Society of America essay prize, Yale College teaching prize, fellowships from the National Humanities Center and Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, and an NEH Public Scholars Award. In 2017, he was named Cittadino Onorario/Honorary Citizen of Acri, Calabria, the birthplace of his Italian parents.