Justin Steinberg

Professor of Italian Literature; Director of Undergraduate Studies; Italian Undergraduate Adviser; Editor-in-Chief, Dante Studies

hjstein@uchicago.edu

Wieboldt 218

Office Hours: By Appointment

773.702.4447

PhD, University of Minnesota, 2000

Professor Steinberg joined the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures faculty in 2003. His scholarship focuses on medieval Italian literature, especially on Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and the early lyric. Related interests include manuscript culture/material philology, reception studies, the connections between legal and literary culture, and medieval political theory.

Currently, he is working on theological/legal/literary conceptions of fictio, on Dante's engagement with the question of "Jewish" justice, and on a book project (Mimesis on Trial: Evidence, Inquest, and Realism in Boccaccio's Decameron) exploring the connection between procedures for investigating and depicting crime and representations of the real in the trecento novella.

Books

Dante and the Limits of the Law (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2013) won the MLA's Howard. R. Marraro Prize.
Selected reviews:
Diacritics 42.4
New York Review of Books 2/19/2015
Renaissance Quarterly 68.1
Speculum 90.1
Italian translation: Dante e i confini del diritto (Viella, 2016).

Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 2007) won the MLA’s Scaglione Publication Prize.
Selected reviews:
Renaissance Quarterly 61.1
Speculum 83.3
Medioevo Romanzo 34.1
Italian translation: Dante e il suo pubblico. Copisti, scrittori e lettori nell’Italia comunale (Viella, 2018).

Selected Articles (click to download):

"Mimesis on Trial: Legal and Literary Verisimilitude in Boccaccio’s Decameron," in Representations 139 (2017): 118-145.
"Dante's Constitutional Miracles (Monarchia 2.4 and Inferno 8-9)," in Lettere Italiane 3 (2016), 431-444.
"Dante's Justice? A reappraisal of the contrapasso," in L'Alighieri 44 (2014), 59-74.
“Dante estravagante, Petrarch disperso, and the Spectre of the Other Woman.” In Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition. Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2009, pp. 263-289.
“Dante’s First Dream between Reception and Allegory: The Response to Dante da Maiano in the Vita nova.” In Dante the Lyric and Ethical Poet. Dante lirico e Etico. Oxford: Legenda, 2010, pp. 92-118.
“Rime disperse: Petrarch’s Damned Poetry and the Poetics of Exclusion.” In Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, pp. 85-102.
“La Compiuta donzella e la voce femminile nel manoscritto Vat. Lat. 3793.” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana 601 (2006): pp. 1-31.

Other essays are viewable here.

Awards, Honors, and Professional Experience

American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2017-2018
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2017-2018
Emilio Goggio Visiting Professorship, University of Toronto, 2016
MLA Howard R. Marraro Prize, 2014
Franke Institute for the Humanities Fellow, 2013-2014
ACLS Fellowship, 2009-2010
MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literature, 2005
Franke Institute for the Humanities Fellow, 2005-2006