Justin Steinberg is featured in the January 5, 2026 UChicago News story, "32 UChicago faculty members receive named, distinguished service professorships in 2026."
Highlights from the article: "Justin Steinberg has been named the William H. Colvin Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the College.
A faculty member in the department since 2003, Steinberg’s scholarship focuses on medieval Italian literature, especially on Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch and the early lyric. His related interests include manuscript culture, material philology, reception studies, the connections between legal and literary culture, and medieval political theory.
He is the author of Law and Mimesis in Boccaccio’s Decameron: Realism on Trial, Dante and the Limits of the Law, which won the MLA's Howard. R. Marraro Prize, and Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy, in addition to numerous articles.
Currently, he is writing a comparative study of poetic justice entitled “Eye for an Eye: Poetic Justice from Aeschylus to Old Boy.”"
An expert in medieval Italian literature—including the writings of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and early lyric poetry more broadly—Steinberg has published influential, award-winning books that situate these works within the literary culture, politics, and legal systems of their time, and he is a highly sought after discussant within his field. Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy, Justin’s first book, is a study of the relationship between Dante and his readership, including poets who Dante influenced and the readers who reproduced and circulated his poetry. Justin followed this with Dante and the Limits of the Law, which describes the complex legal system that animates the Divine Comedy and shows how Dante used fiction to critique the political and legal environment of fourteenth-century Italy. His third monograph, Law and Mimesis in Boccaccio’s Decameron: Realism on Trial, discusses the legal proceedings depicted within the Decameron alongside the developing judicial processes of medieval Italy to argue that Boccaccio’s celebrated realistic narratives, lifelike characters, and naturalistic dialogue were a response to the period’s emergent prosecutorial trends; this latest project was supported by simultaneous fellowships from the ACLS and NEH, an accomplishment few others have achieved. He joined the UChicago faculty as assistant professor of Italian in 2003.
From RLL Department Chair Miguel Martínez: "Justin Steinberg is a leading scholar of medieval Italian literature, and his work on Dante and Bocaccio has been field-defining. The William H. Colvin professorship is a well-deserved recognition for a trajectory of outstanding scholarly achievement, and it brings great honor to our department! Justin is joining a select and distinguished cohort of former colleagues in RLL, from Bernard Weinberg in the 1960s to Bob Kendrick more recently, who once held this professorship."
Read more on Professor Steinberg's RLL Profile.