Giancarlo Tursi

I am Assistant Professor of Translation Studies and Translation Theory in the French and Italian department at the University of California Santa Barbara. I earned my PhD in Comparative Literature from NYU in 2022 and my Masters, also in Comparative Literature, from the Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2015. My doctoral dissertation, entitled “Dialectal Dante: The Politics of Translation in Risorgimento Italy,” explored the phenomenon of dialectal translations of Dante's Divine Comedy in nineteenth-century, unification-era Italy, drawing on archival research conducted in the National Library of Florence. I am currently at work in turning this dissertation into a book. A comparatist by training, I work across the languages I was either raised with or have acquired: Italian, French, and Spanish. I also speak my native Italian dialect of Martinese, a branch of the Neapolitan language family, which allows me to work with a number of other Italian dialects. I have recently started learning the Mayan language of Kaqchikel, a branch of the Mam-Quichean family, spoken by roughly 400,000 people in Central Guatemala. My articles have been published by La Fusta, The King’s Review, and La Società Editrice Fiorentina.