Dr Lachlan Hughes
Research
I work on the literature and music of late medieval Italy, in particular the works of Dante Alighieri and traditions of vernacular song in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Beyond Dante Studies, I am also interested in the music and poetry of the Italian ars nova.
Publications
‘Vita nova XV [8]’, in Dante’s ‘Vita nova’: A Collaborative Reading, ed. by Zygmunt G. Barański and Heather Webb, William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature (Notre Dame University Press, 2023) [forthcoming].
‘Dante’s Arethusa and the Art of Transition’, Modern Language Review, 118.4 (2023) [forthcoming]
‘“Le note di questa comedìa”: Music and Metapoesis in Inferno 16’, Annali d’Italianistica, 39 (2021), 229–45.
‘Italy at Work: Representations of Labour in Italian Culture’, Notes in Italian Studies, 1 (2021), 5–8 [editors’ introduction, co-authored with Bianca Rita Cataldi and Claudia Dellacasa].
Review of George Corbett, Dante’s Christian Ethics: Purgatory and its Moral Contexts, in Modern Language Review, 116.3 (2021), 505–07.
Translations
Poems by Martin Esposito (two from Italian into English and eight from English into Italian), in Alibi. Prima antologia bilingue di poesia italiana nel Regno Unito, ed. by Marta Arnaldi and Luca Paci, Erranze, 12 (Rome: Ensemble, 2022).
Poems by Dante, Cavalcanti, and Petrarch, in Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden, Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue; with an Epilogue by Antonella Anedda Angioy (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020) [collaborative translation with Caroline Dormor].
Selected Conference Papers
‘Boccaccian Traces in Piccolomini’s Historia de duobus amantibus’ — Oxford–Bonn Neo-Latin Colloquium: The Latin Works of Piccolomini (Oxford, 23–24 March 2023).
‘Purgatorio X’ – Botticelli’s Dante: The ‘Commedia’ Between Text and Image in Late Fifteenth-Century Florence (Oxford, 25 November 2022).
‘Singing Dante’s Praises: Laude and Lyric Poetry in Duecento Florence’ — Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference (Warwick, 20–22 April 2022).
‘Laude and Lyric Poetry in Dante’s Florence’ — All Souls Seminars in Medieval and Renaissance Music (Oxford, 27 January 2022).
‘Failed Musicians in Purgatorio I and Paradiso I’ — Congresso Dantesco Internazionale, ‘Alma Dante’ (Ravenna, 15–18 September 2021).
‘Dante’s Missing Sirventese’ — «In via» Dante Network: Dante’s Afterlives (Leeds/Oxford, 24–25 June 2021).
‘The Laudesi and the Stilnovisiti: New Perspectives on Performed Lyric in Medieval Florence’ — New Directions in Medieval Studies on Religious Literature (Zentrum für Mittelalter- und Frühneuzeitforschung, Göttingen, 10–12 June 2021).
‘Perché virtù fa l’uom costante e forte: A Ballata for the Florentine Plague of 1374’ — Current Research in Fourteenth-Century Music (Università di Pavia, 8–9 March 2021).
Oxford Teaching
Italian Prelims, Paper IIB: Translation from Italian.
Italian Prelims, Paper III: Poetry (The Italian Sonnet / Giuseppe Ungaretti; Eugenio Montale).
Italian Prelims, Paper IV: Modern Italian Narrative and Cinema.
Italian FHS, Paper IIA: Translation from Italian.
Italian FHS, Paper VI: Medieval Italian Literature, 1220–1430.
Italian FHS, Paper VII: Renaissance Italian Literature, 1430–1635
Italian FHS, Paper IX: Dante’s Commedia.
Music Prelims, Special Topics: Machaut’s Songs
Music FHS, List A: Vernacular Song in the Long Thirteenth Century.
English FHS, Course II, Paper 2: Medieval English and Related Literatures 1066–1550.
Other activities
I convene the Bibitura Dantis Oxoniensis, a regular lectura dantis series which takes place in various pubs around Oxford. Between 2019 and 2021 I was an editorial assistant for Italian contributions to The Modern Language Review as well as the events co-ordinator for Italian Studies at Oxford (ISO), an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on Italy at the University of Oxford. From 2020 until 2021 I served as one of three founding editors of Notes in Italian Studies, an online, open-access journal published by the Society for Italian Studies.
