Mary Watt

Professor of Italian Studies
Ph.D., University of Toronto

Areas of Interest

Dante and medieval Italian literature, pilgrimage and travel writing, sacred geography, prophecy and political theology, Italian Renaissance culture, literature and law, and the reception of Dante in early modern and modern literature, film, and visual culture.

Bio

Mary Watt is Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Florida. Her research centers on Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy, with particular attention to pilgrimage, prophecy, sacred space, and the cultural and political imaginaries that shape Italian literary traditions from the Middle Ages through the early modern period. She is especially interested in how Italian texts articulate journeys, spiritual, geographic, and ideological, and how Dante’s work informs later narratives of travel, empire, and cultural encounter.

She is the author of Dante’s Golden Legend: Auto-hagiography in the Divine Comedy (2021), Dante, Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition: Spiritual Imperialism in the Italian Imagination (2017), and The Cross that Dante Bears: Pilgrimage, Crusade, and the Cruciform Church in the Divine Comedy (2005). Her articles and book chapters explore Dante’s theology and poetics, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Renaissance and modern receptions of medieval Italy, pilgrimage routes to Rome and Compostela, and the afterlives of Italian literature in film and popular culture. Her current work continues to examine pilgrimage, sacred geography, and Italian literary constructions of the wider world.

Professor Watt teaches courses on Dante, medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, Italian civilization, pilgrimage and travel. She regularly contributes to interdisciplinary initiatives through the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies while remaining deeply engaged in the Italian Studies curriculum and its connections to European and global cultural history.