Nicole López, Ph.D.

Classical Literature of the Western World
Author and Work (Dante)
Shakespeare Studies
Literature and Food
Literature of Peace and Protest

Ph.D., Italian, Stanford University
M.A., Italian, Stanford University
B.A., Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

Nicole López, Ph.D., is a scholar of medieval and early Renaissance European literature, with particular emphasis on the epic and poetic traditions. Her research focuses on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio and on the vibrant literary culture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence. She also examines the reception of Italian literature in Chaucer, Shakespeare and the poetics of the English Renaissance. More broadly, her work investigates the afterlives of medievalism in modernism and Fascism, with special attention to the ways in which texts and objects acquire political meaning, drawing on the critical frameworks of New Materialism and Thing Theory.

Her current book project, From Relics to Regimes: Medieval Materiality and Counter-Myths in 20th-Century European Literature, explores how medieval objects and symbolic forms were reimagined across British, American, French, Spanish and Italian literatures as counter-myths to authoritarian ideologies. She is also completing an article-length study, Dante’s Bow and the Arrow: Poetic Form, Symbolism and the Mechanics of Ethical Agency in the Commedia, which examines the bow-and-arrow motif in Dante as a model of virtue, moral causality and ethical agency.

In the classroom, López treats the study of literature as a humanities laboratory, cultivating intellectual camaraderie, debate and collaborative inquiry. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on Dante and Shakespeare, alongside courses such as Classical Literature of the Western World, Literature and Food and Rhetoric and Composition.

Her scholarship has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Stanford University, the Social Science Research Council and the Mellon Mays Program. López received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Italian from Stanford University and her B.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University.

She also contributes to institutional and community initiatives, including her role in the inaugural Rattler Success Institute, where she designed and taught the Integrated College Skills curriculum, a program that introduced innovative models for supporting student achievement and retention. Her scholarship and teaching have been shared at national and international conferences, and she has served as a keynote speaker at the university’s Academic Convocation in 2024. She also engages in comparative research across Italian, French, Spanish and English literatures.