Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja

I hold a BA in Medieval and Humanistic Philology from the University of Milan, an MPhil in European Literature & Culture, and a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Cambridge. My doctoral research was funded by the Gates Foundation. Before joining Harvard, I served as the Keith Sykes Fellow in Italian Studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

I am a literary scholar and cultural historian specializing in pre-modern Italy (4th-15th century). A broadly unifying characteristic of my literary criticism is a curiosity for what verbal language can do beyond encoding meaning and transferring it. I am drawn to non-propositional discourses, including languages of injury (satire), pedagogies grounded in radical irony (parabolic epistemologies, sufism), the apophatic tradition, non-Aristotelian logic. As a philologist and a historian, I am also engaging with alchemy (Mythoalchemy) and with the tradition of iconic texts (carmina figurata, acrostics, etc.).

I have published studies on Dante’s concept of pure matter, Byzantine dreambooks, the Mediterranean traditions of Alexander the Great, and Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart. A forthcoming book on medieval non-linear exemplarities is being prepared for publication. I am also working on a criminal history of satire in medieval and early modern Italy.

Part of my family is originally from Odessa. I grew up between Milan and Lake Como.

Books

• Vita di Alessandro Magno con figure, Brepols, 2018
• La materia di Dante, Longo, 2024
• Dante’s Nonlinear Exemplarity, University of Toronto Press, 2026