Kristin Phillips-Court

Primary Language

Italian

Specialties and Areas of Research Interest

14th-17th-c. Italian literature and visual art • Machiavelli • 15th-17th-c. theater • Renaissance poetics • politics & patronage • theological debates • Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the reception of the Three Italian Crowns  • Poliziano • Castiglione • Aretino, Vasari • Michelangelo • changing representations women in literature and painting • humanistic geographies and the urban landscape • Paul III, Cosimo I • intermedial arts in the service of the state

Selected Publications

Books

The Perfect Genre. Drama and Painting in Renaissance Italy. Ashgate (Routledge, 2011) MLA Scaglione Award for a Manuscript in Italian Studies.

Reviews: Renaissance Quarterly, Annali d’Italianistica, Italian Studies, Forum Italicum, Italica, CAA, Source, Times Literary Supplement, MLR,, Drammaturgia, 16^th Century Journal

In progress:

• Vasari’s Literary Art 
• Machiavelli, Art, and Nature
• Raphael’s Doubles

Selected articles

• “Vasari’s Other Poet,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance Vol. 27 (Fall, 2024)
• “The Tale of Teodoro and Violante,” Lectura Boccaccii Day V (Toronto: UTP, 2025) forthcoming.
• “A Movable Feast: Ariosto’s theater from inception to reception,” (in progress for A Companion to Ariosto, eds. A.  Ascoli, S. Jossa, & J. Everson (Leiden: Brill, 2025
• “Spectacular Eros,” Introduction to Pietro Aretino’s Erotic Sonnets
• “Machiavelli’s Calumny” (in progess)
• “Vasari, Leonardo, and ‘il vero ritratto del tradimento et inumanità,’” Sixteenth Century Journal Vol. XLII No. 3 (Fall, 2011)
• “The Petrarchan Lover in Cinquecento Comedy,” MLN: Modern Language Notes Vol. 125, Number 1, January 2010 (Italian Issue)
• “Performing Anachronism: Revising the Aetiology of Italian Renaissance Tragedy,” Renaissance Drama Volume 37 “Italy and the Drama of Europe” (2010)
• “Framing the Miracle in Feo Belcari’s Rappresentazione quando la Nostra Donna Vergine Maria fu annunziata dall’Angelo Gabriello,” Annali d’Italianistica Volume 25 “Literature, Religion, and the Sacred” (2007)

Courses

• Machiavelli and His World (LT, PS, ILS, IT 365, IAP)
• Earthly & Heavenly Bodies: The Art of Michelangelo (AH 103)
• Virtue, vice, & the bene comune in Italian Literature and Culture, Dante to Tasso (IT 321)
• Have Brush, Will Travel: The Italian Renaissance between Florence & Rome (AH 106)
• Love and Sex in Italian Comedy (LT 213 *Comm B)
• Machiavelli’s Major Works (IT 951)
• Italian Humanism – Il Quattrocento (IT 632)
• La parola e l’immagine: Lirici del Cinquecento (IT 952)
• L’arme, gli amori, l’arte: Ariosto and the Renaissance Epic (IT 731)
• Tasso and the Late Renaissance (IT 732)
• Prosatori del Cinquecento (IT 952)
• Il teatro italiano (IT 631)
• Rome: The City and the Myth (Ital/Classics 350)
• French and Italian Renaissance Literature (LT 360)
• Italian Renaissance Drama (LT 410)
• Italian Renaissance Art (AH 320)
• Italian Identities in Italian Literature and Culture – Modern to Contemporary (IT 322)
• Advanced Italian Grammar (IT 311)
• Advanced Composition (IT 312)
• Italian for Reading (IT 301)

Distinctions

• UW Honored Instructor Award, Spring, 2024
• UW Honored Instructor Award, Fall 2023
• Vilas Life Cycles Professorship Award, UW-Madison, 2023
• Faculty Development Grant, Art History, UW-Madison, Spring, 2021 UW Sabbatical Award, Spring, 2020
• University of Wisconsin Graduate School Research Competition, “Text, Space, and Interface in Mantegna’s camera picta,” 2020
• Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) UW-Madison, SHRF Fellow, 2019
• Vilas Mid-Career Faculty Award, 2017-19
• Vilas Associates Research Fellowship Award, “Machiavelli’s Tragic Geography” (2016-18)
• Faculty Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, UW, (2016-17)
• MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award, Italian Literary Studies for The Perfect Genre. Drama and Painting in Renaissance Italy (2009)
• Faculty Seminar, UW Institute for Research in the Humanities, “Machiavelli at 500”, 2013
• Honored Instructor Award, UW-Madison (2011-12)
• University of Wisconsin Graduate School Research Competition “Vasari and the Poetics of Monumentality” (2011)
• University of Wisconsin Graduate School Research Competition “Unceremonious Death in Machiavelli’s Il Principe (2010)
• University of Wisconsin Graduate School Research Competition “Changing Definitions of Grace in Early Modern Italy” (2009)
• University of Wisconsin Graduate School Research Competition “Performing Anachronism” (2008)
• UW Center for the Humanities Faculty Development Seminar, “Ovid and Ovidianism” Spring, (2007)
• Poorvu Prize for Interdisciplinary Teaching, Yale University (2001)