Steven J Baker

Steven Baker holds a PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University with a specialization in early modernity. He has been teaching at Columbia since 2006, where he has taught language and literature courses in the Department of Italian and both the literature and philosophy sequences in the Core Curriculum. He serves as the Managing Editor of the Italian Poetry Review, a plurilingual journal of creativity and criticism. His most recent research on the Italian poet and humanist Francesco Petrarca appears in the volume, Speaking Truth to Power in Medieval and Early Modern Italy. In addition to his scholarship, he is also a prolific translator of scholarly, journalistic and literary texts from Italian into English. His most recent translation projects include Gianna Pontecorboli’s Americordo: The Italian Jewish Exiles in America (CPL Editions), the modern Italian novelist Giorgio Bassani’s New York Lectures and Interviews (CPL Editions), the intellectual biography Giuliano Bonfante and Historical Linguistics 1930-2000 (Universitätsverlag Winter), and La Ninetta del Verzee, a mini-epic written in Milanese dialect by the colorful nineteenth-century poet Carlo Porta. He is also working on an English edition of futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s last novel Venezianella e Studentaccio. He is a co-founder and contributor to the blog on lyric opera and the performing arts, Allegri con fuoco. He joined NYU’s School of Professional Studies in 2018.