Rate My Professor Ita Mac Carthy

Professor Ita Mac Carthy is a Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Durham University. She was educated in Ireland and Italy, holding a PhD in Italian Literature from University College Cork. Her academic career began as Lecturer in Italian at Durham University from 2003 to 2007. She then served as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature and Art at the University of Birmingham from 2007 to 2019. Returning to Durham, she was appointed Associate Professor in April 2019, promoted to Professor in July 2020, and became Co-Director of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS) in 2023 in a job-share with Richard Scholar, while also holding the position of Barker Senior Research Fellow.

Mac Carthy's research focuses on the connections between early modern Italian literature and the visual arts within the contexts of cultural and social history and a comparative European perspective. Her scholarly interests include early modern translation, imitation, and adaptation across languages, media, and time; the European reception of the Italian Renaissance; early modern women’s studies; and cognitive approaches to literary and cultural study. Informed by literary, cultural, and art theoretical methods such as gender studies, reception theory, cultural materialism, philology, and cognitively-inflected criticism, her publications illuminate works by sixteenth-century Italian writers including Ariosto, Boiardo, Castiglione, Vittoria Colonna, Tullia d’Aragona, Moderata Fonte, and Curzio Gonzaga, as well as artists like Francesco del Cossa, Michelangelo, and Raphael, tracing their impact on anglophone culture from Shakespeare to Ali Smith. Key books are The Grace of the Italian Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2020), supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship; Women and the Making of Poetry in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (Troubador Press, 2007); Renaissance Keywords (Legenda, 2013), edited by her; and Cognitive Confusions: Dreams, Delusions and Illusions in Early Modern Culture (Legenda, 2017), co-edited with Kirsti Sellevold and Olivia Smith. Currently, she is developing Renaissance Relevance, co-directs the ‘Inventing Futures’ programme tackling global challenges via medieval and early modern resources, and leads ‘Daphne and her Sisters: Framing Gendered Violence’ (2025-29). She featured on BBC Radio 4’s Moving Pictures discussing Francesco del Cossa’s Aprile.