Rocco Rubini

My scholarship investigates the evolution of Italian humanism (in literature, theatre, and thought) from the Renaissance to the 20th century, reclaiming transhistorical continuities between early and later phases of the Italian intellectual tradition – both within Italy and in wider European and American contexts of reception. I teach and study Petrarch, Machiavelli, Renaissance playwrights and theater practitioners (commedia dell’arte), Goldoni, Vico, De Sanctis, and Gramsci, among others, to rethink the distinctive contribution of Italian letters to the making and unmaking of our ongoing “modernity.” 

My research on the Italian Renaissance and its legacy is unfolding via a projected trilogy, beginning with The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger (Chicago, 2014). In this book, I object to the claims of Continental philosophy concerning the question: “What is Humanism?” I argue that the historical “humanism” of the postwar Renaissance scholars (including E. Garin, P.O. Kristeller, E. Grassi and H. Baron) was more alive, tolerant, and potentially more edifying for us today – as students and citizens engaged in reassessing the Western heritage – than the theorized “(anti)Humanism” of the philosophers who inspired them (Sartre and Heidegger, among others). The Other Renaissance was awarded the American Association of Italian Studies Book Prize and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the Best Book in Intellectual History (by the Journal of the History of Ideas).

In Posterity: Inventing Tradition from Petrarch to Gramsci (Chicago, 2022), I leverage the suggestions of the scholars studied in The Other Renaissance to understand “humanism” not as a historical periodization or a bygone intellectual movement, but rather as an approach to “reading” intent on forging transhistorical human relationships. Specifically, I study how a series of thinkers – Petrarch, Giambattista Vico, Carlo Goldoni, Francesco De Sanctis, Benedetto Croce, and Antonio Gramsci – envisioned their literary afterlives and thereby predisposed their work for retrieval via readers’ empathetic engagement with their motives and values.

I am currently working on the third installment of my trilogy, a study of the evolving nature of Italian thought and its reception, provisionally titled Vico and the Serious Poem of Romance Philology. The manuscript broaches the vast international influence of Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), who forged the connection I investigated in The Other Renaissance and Posterity between Renaissance and later permutations of humanism in Italy and abroad. Through Vico, I trace the impact of Italian humanism on the formation of Romance philology in the European and American academy, an influence channeled by Vico aficionados, including Bendetto Croce, Erich Auerbach, Edward Said, and Hayden White.