Marco Piana is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. His field of research focuses on the literary representation of Otherness, gender, and religious identity in Early Modern Europe, with special regard to Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Renaissance Neoplatonism, and pro-woman literature. He is currently involved with the project “Equality and superiority in Renaissance and Early Modern pro-woman treatises” led by Professors Marguerite Deslauriers, and a Graduate Studies Associate to the project Early Modern Conversions. He is also co-founder of the Scuola Internazionale di Teatro Italiano “Giovanni Grasso,” a summer school in Italian language and performance located in Montreal (QC), Canada.
He has published articles on Lucrezia Marinella, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Girolamo Savonarola, and Marsilio Ficino, and guest-edited a special issue of the journal Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme on Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (forthcoming, 2019). He has also translated several sixteenth-century pro-women treatises from Italian into English (two forthcoming in a volume published by Oxford University Press, two others forthcoming in a volume published by CRRS).