Kate Driscoll (Duke University) and jessica goethals (university of alabama), for the translation of Margherita Costa’s Flora Feconda.

Kate Driscoll (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She specializes in early modern Italian literature, women’s and gender studies, and performance history. Her scholarship on Italian epic poetry focuses on questions of agency and voice, prophecy and historiography, and the genre’s reception in opera and other media. Her articles on these and related topics have appeared in Renaissance
Quarterly, I Tatti Studies, Letteratura cavalleresca italiana, California Italian Studies, The Italianist, and the edited collection Masculinities and Representation: The Eroticized Male in Early Modern Italy and England. She is completing her first book, Tasso and Women Readers:
Literary Hospitality in Early Modern Italy (under contract with Cambridge University Press), a study of the dialogue and reception between Torquato Tasso and his women readers, including Margherita Costa. Together with Jessica Goethals, she is translating Costa’s Flora feconda (Fertile Flora) for the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series of Iter Press.

Jessica Goethals (PhD, New York University) is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Alabama. The Ragusa Foundation grant supports her translation of Margherita Costa’s Flora Feconda (Fertile Flora, 1640), the first modern edition of the poem that she is undertaking in collaboration with Kate Driscoll. An epic poem that Costa later converted into a libretto, this work imaginatively transforms the pregnancy of Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of
Tuscany, into a Mediterranean journey. She is the author of Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court (University of Toronto Press, 2023) and co-translator, with Sara Díaz, of Costa’s comedy Li buffoni (The Buffoons), published in the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series (2018).