Jane Tylus is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature and of Divinity at Yale University. Her primary interests are in late medieval and early modern Europe, especially as regards the history of the book, issues of literary ownership, religious writing, and women’s literature. Tylus is the author of Who Owns Literature?: Early Modernity’s Orphan Texts (forthcoming, 2024), Siena, City of Secrets (2015); Reclaiming Catherine of Siena (Winner of the 2010 Modern Language Association’s Howard Marraro Prize for Best Work in Italian Studies); and Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (1993). Her co-edited volumes include Early Modern Cultures of Translation (with Karen Newman, 2015) The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain (with Gerry Milligan; 2011), and The Longman Anthology of World Literature: Early Modern Europe (with David Damrosch, 2003).
Jane Tylus is both a practicing translator of contemporary and early modern women writers (Dacia Maraini, Gaspara Stampa, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici) and a scholar of translation studies. She has served on numerous editorial boards and was General Editor of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance from 2013-22. She has been an honorary member (socia corrispondente) of the Accademia degli Intronati, Siena, since 2015.
Before coming to Yale in 2018, Tylus taught at the U. of Wisconsin-Madison, where she served as Associate Dean for the Humanities and Arts, and at New York University, where she was Founding Director of the Center for the Humanities and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. Tylus had a visiting appointment at the Scuola Normale di Pisa in 2012, and for several semesters she ran NYU’s Master’s Program in Italian Studies at NYU’s Villa La Pietra in Florence. She has held fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Newberry Library, and has twice been at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti as visiting professor.
