School of Humanities and Sciences
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Carolyn Springer
Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature, Emerita
BioProfessor Carolyn Springer came to Stanford in 1985 after receiving a Ph.D. in Italian language and literature from Yale University. She has received fellowships and awards from the American Academy in Rome, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies / Villa I Tatti, the Ford Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation. Her research has focused primarily on Renaissance and nineteenth-century literature and cultural history. She has published articles and reviews in Annali d’italianistica, Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature, Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, Forum Italicum, GRADIVA: International Journal of Literature, The International Journal of the Humanities, Italian Quarterly, The Italianist, Italica (Journal of the American Association of Italian Studies), Modern Language Studies, NEMLA Italian Studies, Quaderni d’italianistica, Renaissance Quarterly, Sixteenth Century Journal, Stanford Italian Review, Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici, Woman’s Art Journal, The Wordsworth Circle, and Yale Italian Studies. Professor Springer’s books include The Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in Italian Romanticism, 1775-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 1987; reprinted in paperback, 2010); Immagini del Novecento italiano (Macmillan, coeditors Pietro Frassica and Giovanni Pacchiano); and History and Memory in European Romanticism (special issue of Stanford Literature Review). Her latest book, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance, appeared in 2010 with University of Toronto Press (reprinted in paperback, 2013).
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Sarah Prodan
Assistant Professor of French and Italian
BioSarah Prodan is an Italianist, early modernist, and Michelangelo scholar whose research and teaching span literature, cultural history, religion, art, and intellectual history. Her work centers on Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries while pursuing broader questions about spirituality and religious experience, human nature and selfhood, perception and knowledge, creativity, and the ways individuals understand and fashion themselves in relation to others and the world.
Her first monograph, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2014), was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies by the Modern Language Association. Her forthcoming book, Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy: Devotional Literature and the Spiritual Life in the Long Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2026), offers a thematic genealogical study of the lyric as a site of devotion in early modern Italy, examining the relationship between literary expression and religious experience and addressing the broader non-materialist, non-dualist worldview exemplified in the religious verse itself.
Her current book projects include Michelangelo and the Knowing Self, an exploration of perception, knowledge, and selfhood across Michelangelo’s textual and visual production, and Between Gods & Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity, a transhistorical and transcultural study of competing conceptions of the human and the enduring tension among humanity, divinity, and animality.
Across her scholarship and teaching, Prodan brings literary analysis into conversation with cultural, religious, intellectual, and art history, using the early modern period both as an object of historical inquiry and as a vantage point from which to investigate enduring questions about human experience.
Prodan is also a writer and singer-songwriter. Her creative work includes Imminence: Florence, 1494, a historical novel set in Renaissance Florence, and three albums of original music.
