Professor Emeritus Robert Rodini

Professor Emeritus of Italian Robert Joseph Rodini passed away in Madison on May 28, 2023, at the age of eighty-six. Bob (or Rob, as many knew him) was born on August 2, 1936, and grew up in the Bay Area of San Francisco and specifically around the area of El Cerrito once known as “Little Italy.” As a consequence, it was natural for Bob to attend the “local” university, the University of California, Berkeley, for his undergraduate and graduate work. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was a stu­dent in the Department of Romance Languages and was one of the last stu­dents at Berkeley to complete the doctoral degree in Romance Languages. Bob greatly admired his dissertation director at Berkeley, Nicolas Perella, from whom he learned how important mentors are for their students in many aspects of their lives, intellectual development, and careers. These lessons guided Bob throughout his thirty-five-year career at the UW-Madison, where he was an invaluable mentor to both graduate students and junior faculty, offering not only his vast knowledge and expertise but also his deep commitment to their growth and success. He guided them through the challenges of academia with patience and wisdom, providing constant support and encouragement that helped them thrive both professionally and personally.

Bob came to Madison in 1965 and rose rapidly through the ranks, becoming full professor in 1976. Over the course of his career, Bob helped turn the Italian section of the department into one of the country’s finest. Bob received numerous honors, local and national. In 1960–61, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for study in Florence (where, appropriately, his love of the Renaissance in all its manifestations was nurtured). This was followed by an American Philosophical Society grant (1970) and an ACLS Fellowship (1976–77). At the UW, Bob held a Vilas Associate grant for outstanding research (1987–89) and received numerous competitive summer research stipends from the Graduate School Research Committee. In 2004, Bob served as honorary president of the American Association for Italian Studies, and during the organization’s twenty-fourth annual conference in Ottawa, he was presented with a Festschrift: Medusa’s Gaze: Essays on Gender, Literature, and Aesthetics in the Italian Renaissance in Honor of Robert J. Rodini that featured contributions from his students and colleagues.

At the UW–Madison, Bob wore a number of important hats over the course of his career as a teacher, researcher, and administrator. He was chair of the Depart­ment of French and Italian (1979–82) and associate chair for Italian on numerous occasions. He was also an outstanding university citizen, serving on a number of key committees, some of which he chaired (Graduate School Research, Graduate School Fellowships, Honorary Degrees, Humanities Divisional Committee, Univer­sity Lectures, Chancellor’s Academic Advisory Council, and Faculty Senate). Bob was a consummate teacher, offering a wide variety of courses on Italian language, literature, and culture for many decades. He was dedicated to mentor­ing his students, undergraduate and graduate, and his courses and seminars on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian literature—with emphases on lyric and epic poetry—were legendary and led to his directing a number of doctoral dissertations. He also initiated two very popular courses offered in English translation for the larger student body: “Dante’s Divine Comedy” and “Images of the Individual in the Italian Renaissance.” On three occasions, he directed or taught on academic programs in Italy: Bologna (UW and Indiana University, 1971–72) and Florence (UW and the University of Michigan: Villa Boscobello, 1982, and Villa Corsi-Salviati, 2000).

Bob made a number of enduring con­tributions in the general field of Renaissance literature: the important monograph, Antonfrancesco Grazzini: Poet, Dramatist and Novelliere (1970), and the extremely valuable reference work, Ludovico Ariosto: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1956–1980 (1984). His numerous published essays focus on Renaissance topics, modern Italian literature, and pedagogical topics (his annotated edition of Giuseppe Berto’s Le opere di Dio). Bob’s articles and book reviews appeared in numerous journals and reference works (Philologi­cal Quarterly, Romanische Forschungen, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, MLN, Forum Italicum, Modern Philology, Romanic Review, and Italica). Toward the end of his career Bob became interested in gender studies, feminist criticism, and the relationship between literature and art in the Renaissance, and published seminal essays in these fields.

In 1984 Bob was appointed editor of Italica, the quarterly journal of the American Association of Teachers of Italian, and over a ten-year period he produced forty substantial issues. In that role, he had a dynamic and determining effect on the course of scholarship in Italian literature, culture, and pedagogy. His activities for the journal continued and confirmed Italica’s place as the pre­mier Italian journal in North America, which is recognized both here and abroad for the excellence of its contributions to scholarship. Bob also played a major role in the general growth of Italian studies by serv­ing on several editorial boards of journals (Forum Italicum and PMLA), book series (the Modern Language Association’s Text and Translation Series), and major reference works (Encyclopedia of the Renaissance),  as well as being a consultant on Italian textbooks for several publishing houses.

After retiring from the UW–Madison, Bob was happily occupied for almost twenty years as a volunteer at Meriter Hospital in Madison. His interest in volunteering at a local hospital perhaps goes back to his youthful thoughts of becoming a doctor or dentist, that is until the science courses at Berkeley dissuaded him from pursuing that idea. And for this decision the world of italianistica is most grateful. Bob was a lifelong lover of clas­sical music and a regular at the Madison Symphony and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. He also had the reputation as a fantastic cook, and his graduate students were the grateful recipients of the pan pizza for which he was famous.

Bob met his future wife, Eleanor Morgan, when they were Fulbright Scholars in Florence, Italy (1960–61). After that year, they began their graduate studies in Italian literature at Berkeley and married in 1962. Eleanor served for many years as a reference librarian at Memorial Library. Shortly after Bob’s death, she passed away on July 26, 2023. They are survived by their two children, Elizabeth and Mark, and by their son-in-law, Charlie Rudin, and two granddaughters, Sofia and Natalie Rudin. Bob was a highly regarded member of our department, the university, and the profession as a whole. All who knew Bob valued his intelligence and expertise, his collaborative spirit and good sense, and his dedication to productive institutional citizenship.