We are delighted to welcome our first New Voices ECR Visiting Fellow to RIISS!
Dr Elisa Cozzi completed her doctorate in English at The Queen’s College, Oxford, in 2024 and is currently teaching at Somerville College. Her research explores the literary connections between Italy and Ireland in the Romantic period, with a particular focus on the Irish writers in the Byron-Shelley circle in Pisa, such as Margaret Mount Cashell, George William Tighe, and John Taaffe. Taaffe, known as the author of the first critical commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy in English, studied at Edinburgh in the early 1810s and moved in the circle of Walter Scott. During her doctorate, Elisa rediscovered Taaffe’s unpublished papers, including an autobiography and drafts of translations of Dante, in a private archive. At Aberdeen, she will research Taaffe’s connections to Scottish Romanticism by drawing on the university’s collections. She plans to complete an essay on Taaffe for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and begin working on a critical edition of his unpublished autobiography.