Dr. Maria Pavlova

Dr. Maria Pavlova obtained her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2015. She has held teaching and research positions at different universities (University of Oxford, University of Warwick) and research centres (Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) in the UK and Italy. Her research interests lie in three main areas: Italian epics and romances from Andrea da Barberino to Torquato Tasso; cultural encounters between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic world (with special focus on the Ottoman Empire); and Renaissance intellectual history. Her first monograph, Saracens and their World in Boiardo and Ariosto (Cambridge: Legenda, 2020), reconstructs the history of Ferrara’s interactions with different Islamic states and contextualises Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s representations of religious Otherness in this Ferrarese context. At the same time, it carefully unravels the literary memories contained in Orlando Innamorato and Orlando furioso, situating these poems within the wider context of the Italian chivalric literary tradition. She is currently working on a critical edition of Raffaele Vacieco’s Quinto libro (1514) as well as two book projects related to her research interests.