His scholarship focuses on early modern intellectual history (magic and demonology, early-modern epic, women writers, Neoplatonic love treatises, baroque literature) and contemporary culture with a special emphasis on a phenomenological approach. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Studi pasoliniani. Among his latest essays are works on Tasso’s poetic self-commentary, our contemporary reception of Pasolini’s documentary The Walls of Sana’a, and essays on Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Marino’s Adone.
He is currently writing two books:
- The World in Ruins (working title), which investigates our contemporary view of destruction and decay in all its connotations.
- Reading Tasso in the Third Millennium (working title) on a reinterpretation of Tasso’s oeuvre based on our contemporary cultural environment.
He is also writing essays on the relationship between modern philosophy and fairy tales, and the early-modern concept of sign in the divinatory discipline called metoposcopy.
He is the author of many books. His latest work is the volume titled Preserving the Spell (2015, University of Chicago Press; Premio Flaiano Italianistica 2016) on the Western interpretation of folk and fairy tales from Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti to the French late seventeenth-century tradition, German Romanticism, and American post-modernism.