Fabio Battista is an Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Alabama, where he also directs the Italian Language Program. His scholarly interests include early modern European culture, translation studies, and second language acquisition. His research has been funded by, among others, a Northeast Modern Language Association Summer Grant (2015) and an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship (2018-2019). In 2021, he was awarded the Anne Jacobson Schutte Early Career Research Grant by the Society for Reformation Research.

Dr. Battista has just published his first book, The Queen of Scots / La reina di Scotia, which is the first bilingual edition of Federico Della Valle’s early modern tragedy on Mary Queen of Scots, for the Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library Series of the University of Toronto Press (2023). He is also working on his monograph, provisionally entitled Staging English Affairs in Early Modern Italy: History, Politics, Drama, in which he investigates the transmission of knowledge and the fictionalization of facts across the European continent, with a particular attention to the Anglo-Italian case. In addition to his work in early modern studies, Dr. Battista is active in second language acquisition and curriculum development, having recently published an article on “Black Italians and the Case of Zero” in Teaching Italian Language and Culture Annual. He has also authored several translations (including Christian Uva’s book Sergio Leone: Cinema as Political Fable for Oxford University Press, 2020) and is a contributor to Stories for a Year, the English-language digital edition of Luigi Pirandello’s short stories.

Education

• PhD, Comparative Literature, The Graduate Center, CUNY (2019)
• MA, Modern Languages, Literatures, and Translation, Sapienza Università di Roma (2012)