Professor Stephen J Milner
Serena Professor of Italian and Head of Section
Address: W3.04, Samuel Alexander Building
Phone: +44 (0) 161 275 3129
Email: Stephen.J.Milner@manchester.ac.uk
Office hours: Tuesday 10:00-11:00 and Thursday 2:00-3:00
Research specialisation
My research seeks to present a revisionist approach to, and reading of, late medieval and Renaissance Italian cultural history. Through an interdisciplinary approach which draws on anthropology, sociology, social, political, and art history, the study of rhetoric, and the history of the classical tradition, the aim is to produce a form of cultural history which stresses the interrelation between linguistic, material, and spatial practices in the articulation of cultural identities. To this end I deploy a range of linguistic, palaeographical and iconographical approaches to my study of archival, manuscript, published, pictorial, and architectural sources. In addition, through a continuing engagement with critical and cultural theory I am constantly exploring new ways of reading and writing about the cultures of the past.
Areas of particular interest include:
- Rhetoric and the revival of popular vernacular oratory 1240-1512
- Space and communal imagination in the late medieval communes
- The Florentine territorial state under the Medici
- Artistic patronage and cultural translation in Renaissance Italy
- Cultural theory and the historiography of the Italian Renaissance
Research Awards
- 2005-06 Institute for Advanced Studies Research Fellow, University of Bristol
- 1999-2000 Hannah Kiel Fellow, Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence
- 1998-99 UK Arts & Humanities Research Board, Study Leave Award
- 1990 Italian Government Research Award, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
- 1989-1990 Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship, European University Institute, Fiesole
- 1989 Short term Research Fellow, British School in Rome
Select Publications
The Cultures of the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwells/ Polity Press) forthcoming.
The Erotics of Consolation: Distance and Desire in the Middle Ages (New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) forthcoming 2007. Co-edited with Catherine Lèglu in the 'The New Middle Ages' series edited by Bonnie Wheeler.
At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), i-x + pp. 283. ISBN 0-8166-3821-7. In series Medieval Cultures', n. 39.
Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 392. ISBN 0-521-82688-8. Co-edited with Stephen J. Campbell (The Johns Hopkins University)
Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince and Other Political Writings (London: J. M. Dent, Everymans Library, 1995), i-xxvi + pp.147. ISBN 0-460-87629-5.
Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince, Phoenix paperback edition (London, 1996), pp. 62. ISBN 1-85799-535-X
Click the highlited link to see a full list of publications.
Professional biography
A graduate of History from the University of Cambridge, I undertook my PhD. research in Combined Historical Studies at the Warburg Institute, University of London, returning to Cambridge as Lecturer in Italian in 1991. The following year I took up a permanent Lectureship in Italian at the University of Bristol, becoming Senior Lecturer in 2003 and moving to Manchester as Serena Professor of Italian in 2006. From 1999-2000 I was a Hannah Kiel Fellow at Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence, and in 2005-06 a Research Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol.
I am a member of the Society for Italian Studies, the Renaissance Society of America, the Medieval Academy of America, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, and The Society for Renaissance Studies which I served as Honorary Secretary between 1992 and 1998.
Teaching Areas
My principal teaching areas at both undergraduate and postgraduate level are in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Taught units include: Reading Renaissance Culture; Society, Perception and Self in the Italian Renaissance; The Licence to Laugh: Italian Renaissance Comedy; Narrative Voices and Trecento Readers: Boccaccio's Decameron.