Samuel FitzGibbon

I am beginning a doctorate in Italian, supervised by Professor Virginia Cox. I am researching Italian cultural responses to the Age of Discovery, to understand how Italians living on the peninsula perceived and could vicariously experience the wider (and ever wider) world that was opened to Europeans during this period. Deriving a methodology from the Petrarchan phenomenon of imagined travel – initiated in his case through parallel reading of literature and a map – my thesis will comprise a series of metaphorical ‘explorations’ of parts of the globe from the Renaissance Italian perspective. These will be interdisciplinary and thematic studies comparing literature with contemporaneous visual, material and cartographical sources.

My MPhil dissertation looked at fifteenth-century Italian exiles’ practices of letter-writing. I focused on the themes of family and home in a decades-long correspondence between the Florentine patrician woman Alessandra Strozzi and her exiled sons.

I have a BA in German and Italian (Bristol, 2019) and an MPhil in European Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2021). Outside my academic work I enjoy writing about contemporary visual culture, especially art, design and architecture (Apollo, WWD, Lampoon). During a year out between my BA and my MPhil I worked with the author and broadcaster John Kampfner on the Guardian Book of the Year and Sunday Times Bestseller Why the Germans Do It Better (Atlantic, 2020). During my Erasmus+ year abroad I studied at the Humboldt in Berlin and worked in Milan. I grew up in London and have dual German and British citizenship.