Fara Taddei is a scholar of medieval Italian literature and GSS. She recently defended a dissertation on the role of female sexuality and readership in creating community in the Decameron. Her research is based on restoring the connections between historical aspects of sexuality (from the medical, legal, and theological points of view) and the literary text.
Fara obtained her BA from the University of Bologna with a double major in Italian and French, completing a thesis in medieval art history on the role of French patronage in the work of Giotto in Northern Italy. In Bologna she was also a student of the Collegio Superiore and earned an MA in Italian literature. She moved to the US in 2014 and completed an MA in French from UIUC before joining The University of Chicago as a PhD student. Currently, she is a scholar of Italian literature and she specializes in late medieval discourses of sexuality and its representations and connections to the literary text and historical context. In her dissertation, “’Le Muse son donne’: sessualità, comunità e lettura al tempo del Decameron,” (“’The Muses are women’: Sexuality, Community, and Readership in the Age of the Decameron”), she approached the representation of sex work and female pleasure in the Decameron, connecting them to medical and legal discourses and situating the gender binary of courtly love in the civic context imagined by Boccaccio. Currently she is working on publishing parts of her dissertation and furthering her work on the role of the French fabliaux as a model for Boccaccio’s representation of sex work.
Her research has been supported by the American Boccaccio Association, the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities among others.
As an instructor of language and culture courses, she is passionate about introducing students to the Italian world through an immersive use of language and authentic content; her teaching includes learning through experience and creativity. She has been a graduate assistant in study abroad programs in Rome and recommends this experience to any curious student.
Recent courses in RLL
- FREN 10300 Beginning Elementary French III (Autumn 2020)
- ITAL 10100 Beginning Elementary Italian I (Autumn 2025)
- ITAL 10200 Beginning Elementary Italian II (Winter 2026)
- ITAL 24026 Translating Gender Across France and Italy (Spring 2026)