Dr Shanti Graheli
- Senior Lecturer (Comparative Literature)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7183-0886Research interests
My academic work is a combination of literary and historical studies, with a focus on the materiality of books and texts. I specialise on the circulation of Italian Renaissance books abroad and on the dynamics of consumption and reception that facilitated that circulation. My monograph Italian Books and the French Renaissance, will offer a substantial new contribution to understand the fortune and dissemination of Italian culture in early modern Europe, by taking into account issues of cultural and linguistic integration, translation practices and readership, and proto-national identity (Brill, forthcoming).
I have been exploring this question further in a project funded by the Carnegie Trust, 'Importing Knowledge: Italian Books in Scottish University Libraries', with Ms Michelle Craig and CJ Walker working with me as research assistants. In 2024-2025 I am building on this research through a Leverhulme-funded Research Fellowship for a project entitled "A comparative study of Italian and French Renaissance Books in Scotland".
I write on different aspects of print culture, from the production to the dissemination and reception of texts in early modern Europe. I am particularly interested in early publishing firms that managed to establish a strong connection with their anonymous public, particularly within the context of Renaissance Venice. One of my current research projects, co-authored with Ester C. Peric (Naples and Udine), is a study of the commercial catalogues produced by the Aldine Press in sixteenth-century Venice. This project has received support from the Bibliographical Society, the Printing Historical Society, Houghton Library at Harvard University, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
I joined the University of Glasgow as Lord Kelvin Adam Smith fellow in Comparative Literature and Translation (2017-2020), pursuing a project entitled "A European Bestseller: The Orlando Furioso and Its Readers", which investigates how the mutual influence between publishers and readers shaped the marketplace of print and, in this particular case, the popularity of a specific text. The project, ongoing, has also benefited from the generous support of the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington, DC) and the Willison Charitable Trust. An important outcome of this work will be a volume of essays entitled 'Bestsellers in the Pre-Industrial Age', co-edited with Professor Warren Boutcher (QMUL). This is based around the proceedings of a conference on the same topic held in Glasgow in May 2019, and supported by the University of Glasgow, the Society for Renaissance Studies (https://www.rensoc.org.uk/) and Past & Present (https://pastandpresent.org.uk/).
Grants
2024-25 Leverhulme Research Fellowship, "A Comparative Study of Italian and French Renaissance Books in Scottish Libraries"
2023-25 Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, grant for the project "Printing after the plague: Aldine editions (1575-1598) in Venetian libraries"
2023-24 Houghton Library, Harvard, Visiting Fellowship on “The decline of the Aldine Press between crisis and innovation”.
2023 Printing Historical Society (UK), grant for the project “Crisis and innovation in the final years of the Aldine Press: evidence from the catalogues and printing practices”
2023 Bibliographical Society (UK), grant for the project “The last Aldine Cicero, or the straw that broke the camel’s back".
2019-2023 Carnegie Trust Research Incentive Grant, for the project “Importing Knowledge: Italian Books in Scottish University Libraries”.
2019 Willison Trust Charitable Foundation Trust, for the project “Making a Renaissance bestseller: The Orlando furioso and the marketplace of print”.
2018 Society for Renaissance Studies Major Grant for the conference “Bestsellers in the Pre-Industrial Age” (Glasgow, 23-24 May 2019).
2018 Past & Present grant for the conference “Bestsellers in the Pre-Industrial Age” (Glasgow, 23-24 May 2019).
2018-2019 Holland Visiting Fellowship, Durham University Libraries, for the project “From Venice to Durham: 500 Years, 500 Books”.
2017-2018 Short-term visiting fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, for the project "A European Bestseller: The Orlando Furioso and Its Readers".
2016-2017 Major Grant from the Bibliographical Society, Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association Award, for the project “French Libraries in the Long Renaissance”.
2016-2017 Residential postdoctoral fellowship “Andreazza” awarded by the Cini Foundation in Venice, for the project “L’antiquariato italiano nei secoli XX-XXI e la rarità del libro antico” (Italian antiquarian booksellers in the 20th and 21st century and the rarity of the book).
Supervision
Any aspects of Renaissance literature and culture, with a particular focus on issues related to print culture, knowledge exchange, the transmission and reception of texts across borders, and the migration of cultural agents involved with such exchanges. I also welcome enquiries for work on the history of reading and libraries, collecting practices, the uses and afterlife of books within a diachronic perspective.
- Jin, Yujia
Representations of the Italian Renaissance in the 21st Century: the Borgia and Medici Families stories on the small screen
Teaching
I convene the MLitt in Comparative Literature.
I have taught on the following modules:
- Comparative Literature 1A - Heroes (COMPLIT1001)
- Comparative Literature 1C - Heroism across time and cultures (COMPLIT1011)
- Theories of Reading (COMPLIT4003)
- Bestsellers in the Pre-Industrial Age
- Writing Subjects (COMPLIT4015)
- Myths and Modern Imagination (COMPLIT4032)
- An Introduction to Comparative Literature (COMPLIT5030)
- Comparative Literature in Practice (COMPLIT5031)
- Reading Workshop in Comparative Literature (COMPLIT5036)
Office hours: by email appointment (on funded leave AS 2024-25).
Additional information
Selected invited talks and lectures
10 May 2024 “The Ecosystem(s) of Multilingual Print”, Workshop: Multilingual Printing in the Early Modern Age, St Andrews.
2-5 May 2023 “Italian Books in Germany: Reading Practices in Negotiating Foreign Texts”, International conference: Commercio librario tra stati italiani e stati di lingua tedesca (1450-1800), Villa Vigoni, Loveno di Menaggio (Como, Italy).
13 November 2022 “The Aldine family business between inheritance and intellectual legacy: a view from the booklists, 1498–1597” (with Ester C. Peric), 43rd Book Trade Conference, London.
6 September 2022 “Translating nature: readers, amateurs, and collectors negotiating naturalistic terminology across borders”, International conference: Translation in early modern Europe. Domains, networks, theories (University of Padua).
20 December 2021 “French readers and the book in early modern Venice: tourism, shopping, and epistolary networks”, The Subversive Imprint. Power, Erudition and Books in Early Modern Europe (University of Padua).
23 September 2021 “Learning the Italian canon: Petrarch and Ariosto annotated by foreign readers”, International conference: Handwriting in Print: Commenting, Correcting, Rewriting, 1500-1800 (Heidelberg, 23-25 September 2021).
22 March 2021 “Shopping for books and book tourism: French Travellers in Early Modern Italy”, Edinburgh Early Modern Network.
14-15 October 2019 “Tammaro De Marinis e l’uso dei cataloghi antiquari come strumenti bibliografici”, International conference: “Multa renascentur. Tammaro De Marinis studioso, bibliofilo, antiquario, collezionista”, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice.
11 June 2019 “Italian books abroad, 1501-1600”, IMEMS seminar, University of Durham.
7 June 2019 “The Trigge Library, Grantham, and the World's Rarest Books”, Public lecture, with Dr Graeme Kemp. Grantham, Trigge Library.
17 March 2019 “Italy-France-Scotland: A privileged route for Renaissance books”, RSA Annual Meeting, Toronto (session sponsored by the Newberry Library, Chicago).
27 February 2019 “Tutte le opere di Giulio Camillo nell’officina di Gabriele Giolito. Un caso bibliografico singolare?”, International conference ‘La filologia dei testi a stampa. Per il decennale della scomparsa di Conor Fahy (1928-2009)’, Udine.
9 November 2018 Respondent to plenary lecture by Orietta Da Rold, “From Pulp to Fictions: The Role of Paper before Print”, Working with Archives, Kelvin Hall, Glasgow.
9 November 2018 “Sleuthing for Renaissance Readers: Interpreting Marginalia and Other Marks”, masterclass, XIII Quadrivium, Glasgow.
25 September 2018 “Used Books and the Republic of Letters”, Annual meeting of the working group for Library, Book and Media Studies at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: Das gebrauchte Buch / The Used Book, Wolfenbüttel.
20 September 2018 “Losing touch with customers: Making books in the Renaissance from custom to mass-produced”, LE STUDIUM conference: Lost in Renaissance, Tours.
4 July 2018 “Annotated copies of Orlando furioso”, Community of Print conference: Touching the Past. Materiality of Texts in Early Modern Europe, Manchester.
7 June 2018 “Consumers of Popular Print through Early Modern Europe”, EDPOP International Conference: European Dimensions of Popular Print Culture. Comparative approaches, Utrecht.
30 November 2017 “A Renaissance Bestseller: The Orlando furioso and the Marketplace of Print”, Reformation Institute Lecture, St Andrews.
17 November 2017 “Consumers of Popular Print: Problems, Methodology and Indirect Evidence”, EDPOP workshop, The John Rylands University Library, Manchester.
27 June 2017 “Knowledge, Print, and Power: The Rise and Fall of the Accademia Veneziana”, Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick.
International Collaborations
Associate of the USTC - The Universal Short Title Catalogue, dir. by Andrew Pettegree, University of St Andrews (http://ustc.ac.uk/).
Participant, Sammelband15-16 research group, dir. by Malcolm Walsby, ENSSIB, Lyon (https://sammelband.hypotheses.org/).
Participant, EDPOP: The European Dimensions of Popular Print Culture network, dir. by Jeroen Salman, Utrecht (https://edpop.wp.hum.uu.nl/).
Learned Societies
RSA - Renaissance Society of America (https://www.rsa.org/)
SRS - Society for Renaissance Studies, UK (https://www.rensoc.org.uk/)
BCLA - British Comparative Literature Association, Executive Committee: https://bclaonline.wordpress.com/
