Victoria Pipas '21

Victoria Pipas has continued to focus on poetry of the English Renaissance, and particularly on the works of Edmund Spenser, paying close attention to the reception of classical genres in the medieval and Renaissance periods and also the French humanist influences. In her M.A. essay Victoria explored how early sixteenth-century humanist descriptions of Rome's decay shaped Spenser's poetic conceptualizations of matter. She looks forward to continuing to pursue this line of inquiry as I begin a PhD in English at Harvard University this fall. The variety of courses and research experiences this year at Dartmouth struck her as endlessly fulfilling, and she took classes on Dante, Chaucer, medieval Latin, and Renaissance and Baroque sculpture. She was a teaching assistant for the introductory Comparative Literature lecture course"Read the World" and assisted Professor Noelia Cirnigliaro in her research into early modern dance in the English, French, Italian, and Spanish Baroque periods. Additionally, throughout the year, she continued as research assistant and project manager to Professor James Hankins (Harvard University) on his "Patrizi Project," helping modernize an Elizabeth English epitome translation of Francesco Patrizi of Siena's De institutione reipublicae (1465/71), a humanist "virtue politics" text. In March, she presented a portion of my Oxford MSt dissertation on the "Petrarch Beyond Subjectivity" panel of the 2021 NeMLA Convention and then gave a paper "House, Gardin, and chambre: Tapestry Form and the Construction of Courtly Space in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene," at the slightly more intimate Renaissance Conference of Southern California. She looks forward to revising her Dartmouth M.A. Essay for submission to a publication this summer.