Staff profile

I was appointed Associate Professor at Durham in April 2019, made Professor in July 2020, and became director of Durham’s Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (in a job share with Richard Scholar) in 2023. Before that, I was a Lecturer in Italian at Durham (2003 – 2007) and a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature and Art at the University of Birmingham (2007 – 2019). I was educated in Ireland and Italy. 

My research concerns the connections between early modern Italian literature and the visual arts, seen in the context of cultural and social history and in a comparative European perspective. Within that, I contribute to evolving scholarly conversations about translation and adaptation across languages, between media and over time. My work is informed by various literary, cultural and art theoretical approaches, engaging in particular with gender studies, reception theory, cultural materialism, philological modes of enquiry and cognitively-inflected criticism.

My first book (2007) explored the treatment of women in Ariosto’s literary masterpiece, while my most recent book The Grace of the Italian Renaissance (2020) ranged more widely across the cultural landscape of early modern Italy. With chapters dedicated to major as well as minor Renaissance protagonists, it explored grace as a complex keyword that conveys and connects the most pressing ethical, social and aesthetic debates of that period in time. It was funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Other publications include Renaissance Keywords (2013) and Cognitive Confusions: Dreams, Delusions and Illusions in Early Modern Europe (2017). I am the author, too, of essays and articles on sixteenth-century Italian writers (such as Ariosto, Boiardo, Castiglione, Vittoria Colonna, Tullia d’Aragona, Moderata Fonte and Curzio Gonzaga) and on artists (like Francesco del Cossa, Michelangelo and Raphael). As well as illuminating aspects of their work, I examine their presence in and impact on certain areas of anglophone culture, bringing them into trans-historical dialogue with writers that range from Shakespeare to Ali Smith.

Current Research

My current book project, provisionally called Renaissance Relevance, builds on essays exploring some of the many afterlives of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (2017 & 2019). Closely aligned with the ‘Daphne and her Sisters’ project, it examines uses (and abuses) of early modern Italian literature and art across cultures and time, and seeks to understand the processes of transmission and translation that render them newly relevant time and again.

Collaborative Projects

At IMEMS, I co-direct with Richard Scholar ‘Inventing Futures’ (IFs), a programme of research which emphasizes future-oriented consequences of past-oriented study. The programme draws on our community’s knowledge of the past to tackle a number of the urgent challenges facing humankind today. Thanks to a transformative donation from Joanna and Graham Barker, we launched three IFs flagship projects in 2024 and are actively developing further projects to represent the chronological and disciplinary range of our research community. Each project will address a particular global challenge related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG), using the rich array of medieval and early modern resources at Durham and beyond to yield new responses to it.

As part of IFs, I lead a team of researchers on the collaborative project ‘Daphne and her Sisters: Framing Gendered Violence’ (2025-29). The project takes its name from Ovid’s Daphne who fled Apollo’s unwelcome advances in the Metamorphoses before transmogrifying into a laurel tree to escape him. Inspired by Daphne and her afterlives in image and word, it studies depictions of violence against women in the literature and art of the global early modern past. Of particular interest are artistic or literary figures whose profound impact can be traced through imitations, adaptations, translations and other forms of artistic recreation across cultures and time. As we investigate the complex connections between such cultural artefacts and the societies that produced them, our team seeks to deploy them afresh in the global campaign to tackle the very violence they depict.

Media

BBC Radio 4 podcast Moving Pictures, "Aprile by Francesco del Cossa"

Hear more about The Grace of the Italian Renaissance here. 

Postgraduate Supervision

I welcome research proposals from students interested in: Italian Renaissance literature and art; the history of gendered violence and its representation in literature and art; early modern translation, imitation and adaptation; the politics of translation; the connections between literature and the visual arts of the period 1500-1900; the European reception of the Italian Renaissance; questions of literary and aesthetic theory and practice; early modern women’s studies; and cognitive approaches to literary and cultural study.

• Italian Renaissance literature and art
• Early modern translation, imitation and adaptation
• Connections between literature and the visual arts (1500-1900)
• European reception of the Italian Renaissance
• Early modern women’s studies
• Cognitive approaches to literary and cultural study

Authored book

• Mac Carthy, I. (2020). The Grace of the Italian Renaissance. Princeton University Press
• Mac Carthy, I. (2007). Women and the Making of Poetry in Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Troubador Press

Chapter in book

• Mac Carthy, I. (2021). Una grazia tutta per sé nelle opere di Tullia d'Aragona. In C. Pepe, & E. Porciani (Eds.), Sconfinamenti di genere: donne coraggiose che vivono nei testi e nelle immagini (121-135). DiLBeC Books
• Mac Carthy, I. (2020). The Eloquence of Grace: Raphael’s Study for the Three Graces. In B. Thomas, & C. Whistler (Eds.), Raphael: Drawing and Eloquence (149-169). Urbino: Accademia Raffaello
• Mac Carthy, I. (2019). Fiordispina's English Afterlives: from Harington to Ali Smith. In J. Everson, A. Hiscock, & S. Jossa (Eds.), Ariosto, the 'Orlando furioso' and English Culture. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197266502.003.0007
• Mac Carthy, I. (2017). Reverse Othello Syndrome by Another Name: Ariosto’s Deluded Hero. In I. Mac Carthy, K. Sellevold, & O. Smith (Eds.), Cognitive Confusions: Dreams, Delusions and Illusions in Early Modern Culture. Legenda. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16km1n8.5

Edited book

• Mac Carthy, I., Sellevold, K., & Smith, O. S. (Eds.). (2017). Cognitive Confusions: Dreams, Delusions and Illusions in Early Modern Culture. Legenda
• Mac Carthy, I. (Ed.). (2013). Renaissance Keywords. Legenda

Journal Article

• Mac Carthy, I. (2018). Raphael: The Drawings. Renaissance Studies, 32(5), 848-857. https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12382
• Mac Carthy, I. (2009). Grace and the “Reach of Art” in Castiglione and Raphael. Word and Image, 25, 33-45
• Mac Carthy, I. (2009). Ariosto the Lunar Traveller
• Mac Carthy, I. (2007). Ariosto the Traveller. Modern Language Review, 102(2), 397-409. https://doi.org/10.2307/20467285