Cynthia Nazarian

Cynthia Nazarian received her B.A. (magna cum laude) from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from Princeton University, both in Comparative Literature. In exploring early modern poetry in France, England and Italy, her interests range widely from the aesthetics of violence, gender and the body to classical imitation and the role of poetry in nation-building and the development of vernacular languages. She is currently at work on a book entitled Petrarch’s Wound: Love, Violence and the Writing of the Renaissance Nation that focuses on the use of Petrarchan tropes in the formation of early modern national identities. Petrarch’s Wound breaks with the tradition of reading sonnet sequences as self-enclosed, isolated cycles to argue that in the 16th century, writing love poetry after Petrarch was an act of nation-building. Petrarch’s Wound shows that the freight of violence and fragmentation in early modern lyric reflects the struggle to forge a national literary canon in a disadvantaged vernacular, in the face of classical greatness and the literary achievement of Petrarch himself. In thinking about images of violence and fragmentation in 16th-century Petrarchan poetry, Dr. Nazarian’s work aims to unearth the ‘nationalist’ and political concerns that speak through metaphors of the body violated in love.

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