Meredith K. Ray

Meredith K. Ray

Elias Ahuja Professor of Italian
 

Office: 121 Jastak-Burgess Hall

 

Biography

​Meredith K. Ray is Elias Ahuja Professor of Italian at the University of Delaware​, where she teaches courses on medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, history, and culture; Italian theater and music; and Italian detective fiction. She regularly offers courses on women writers of early modern Europe, Italy in the age of the Scientific Revolution, and Dante's Divine Comedy in Italian and in translation. She is affiliated with the Department of Women and Gender Studies and the European Studies program at the Center for Global and Area Studies.

Dr. Ray's research focuses on Italian women's writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, early modern science, epistolary writing, convent culture, and contemporary fictions of Renaissance Italy. She is the recipient of fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Renaissance Society of America. Dr. Ray is the author of three monographs on women in early modern literary and scientific culture and has co-edited translations of Machiavelli and of Arcangela Tarabotti, the radical seventeenth-century nun and writer. Her books have been recognized with awards from national professional associations. Dr. Ray's current book project, forthcoming from Routledge, is Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Italian Renaissance. 

Dr. Ray welcomes the opportunity to work with B.A. and M.A. students interested in researching early modern topics and she regularly participates in the UD Undergraduate Research and Summer Scholars programs.
 

Degrees

  • ​Ph.D., University of Chicago