Carla Mazzio

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Carla Mazzio teaches in the Department of English at the University of Chicago and specializes in Renaissance literary and cultural studies. Her research interests include the history of science and technology, the history of the book, and the history of language development in relation to idea formation and social agency. Her books include “The Inarticulate Renaissance” (forthcoming), the coauthored Book Use, Book Theory, 1500–1700 (University of Chicago Press, 2005), and the coedited Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (Routledge, 2000), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 1997), and Social Control and the Arts: An International Perspective (New Cambridge Press, 1990).

While a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Mazzio will focus on her current book project, “Calculating Minds: Literature and Mathematics in the Renaissance.” This project explores the irrational dimensions of mathematical theory and practice as they informed literary and aesthetic innovation in the Renaissance. Mazzio aims to complicate the long-standing link between the development of mathematics and the “rise of rationalism” in England and Europe.

Mazzio earned her PhD at Harvard University in 1998 and taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor before going to Chicago in 2001. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 2004, a Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies honor for scholarly achievement in 2005, the English Association’s Beatrice White Prize for The Body in Parts in 1999, and four Derek Bok Prizes for Excellence in Teaching at Harvard, 1993–1997.