Professor Quaintance has been nominated for a Villa I Tatti Fellowship for post-doctoral research at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti. The center, which is located just outside of Florence, Italy, is devoted to advanced study of the Renaissance in all its aspects, including art, literature and music; social and economic history; the history of science, religion, and philosophy. Each academic year, Villa I Tatti hosts a select group of fifteen international scholars of Italian Renaissance culture, selected by a committee of top experts in the field. As an I Tatti Fellow, Professor Quaintance will participate in interdisciplinary seminars, colloquia, and workshops with her colleagues. She will also have access to an abundance of resources, including the Villa’s own Berenson library, which holds a rich collection of Renaissance books and secondary sources on all aspects of Renaissance culture, and the archives, libraries, and museums of Florence.
While in residence at the center in 2015-2016, Professor Quaintance will focus on researching and writing her new book project, “Women, Performance, and Publication in Baroque Italy.” The book explores the ways in which women’s voices were both negotiated and heard in the seventeenth century, exploring connections between the emergence of the first public prima donnas, the birth of opera, and writing by and about women. Reading both singing and writing as public performance, it combines archival research, literary analysis, and case studies of women singers and writers to offer an interdisciplinary perspective on the sexual politics of Italian baroque culture.
