Fields
Medieval and Early Modern Italian literature; theories and practices of improvisation; geography and literature, classical reception
Education & Training
- PhD, Italian Literature, Yale University
- MA, Italian Literature, Middlebury College
- BA, Classics, Yale University
Representative Publications
“Books of Islands (Isolari) and Information Networks between Venice and the Ottoman Empire: The Case of Tommaso Porcacchi’s L’isole più famose del mondo.” MLN 139.1 (2024): 60-85.
“Islands in Flux: Migration and Ecological Change in Early Modern Isolari (Books of Islands).” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 26.1 (2023): 91-108.
A Sudden Frenzy: Improvisation, Orality, and Power in Renaissance Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022.
“Forging Relations Between East and West: The Invented Letters of Sultan Mehmed II,” In Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450-1800. Ed. Earle Havens and Walter Stephens, 118-34. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
“Boccaccio’s Demogorgon and Renaissance Platonism.” Italian Studies 74.1 (2019): 1-9.
Luigi Pulci in Renaissance Florence and Beyond: New Perspectives on his Poetry and Influence, co-ed. and introd. with Andrea Moudarres (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018)
"Translating Impiety: Girolamo Frachetta and the First Vernacular Commentary on Lucretius." Quaderni d'Italianistica 35.1 (2014): 55-72.
"Boccaccio's Humanistic Ethnography (De Canaria)." Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works. Ed. V. Kirkham, M. Sherberg, and J. Smarr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
“Furor and Philology in the Poetics of Angelo Poliziano.” New Worlds and the Italian Renaissance. Leiden: Brill, 2012: 251-289.
“Observations on Vico as Reader of Lucretius.” New Vico Studies 25 (2007): 35-51.
“Mitomania e metamorfosi di Olimpia." Paragone Letteratura 48, 49, 50 (August - December 2003): 114-125.
Research Interests
James Coleman works on the literature and culture of Italy between the 14th and 18th centuries. His first monograph, entitled A Sudden Frenzy: Improvisation, Orality, and Power in Renaissance Italy (2022, University of Toronto Press), explores the intellectual and cultural history of improvisation and oral poetry in Renaissance Italy, examining the rich interplay between the classicizing culture of Italian Renaissance humanism and the improvisational performance tradition that constituted one of the most popular forms of entertainment. His book won the 2023 American Association of Teachers of Italian Book Award in the First Book category, and received Honorable Mention in the First Book category for the 2022 American Association of Italian Studies Book Prize.
Coleman is now working on a book project tentatively entitled Reading Archipelagos: Italian Humanism and Renaissance Books of Islands. The project, supported by a 2019-2020 residential fellowship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, and by the Giles Constable Award from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, focuses on the category of books known as the isolari (Books of Islands). This genre, which emerged in 15th-century Italy and remained popular well into the 17th century, offered a shifting combination of visual and textual representations of islands, maps and navigational aids, travel narratives and advice for wayfarers, archaeology and epigraphy, poetry and mythology, ancient history and current events, natural history and ethnography.
The book project examines the uses of the Books of Islands across transnational readership communities, assesses their innovative combinations of media, and analyzes representations of the environmental drivers and consequences of human migration and commerce through the islands of the early modern Mediterranean.