Giulio Pertile

Biography

Giulio Pertile received his BA in English from Harvard, his MPhil in English from Cambridge, and his PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton. He has held research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.

Research Interest

Giulio's current research is focused on states of liminal consciousness in Renaissance literature; his interests more broadly are in questions of emotion, sensation, and cognition in literature, and in literature's relationship to philosophy and intellectual history. Entitled Feeling Faint: Affect and Consciousness in the Renaissance (Northwestern University Press, under contract), his first book is a study of swoons and trances in Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare. He has also recently written on sleep and near-sleep states in Italian, French, and English sonnet sequences, on mortification and self-mutilation in King Lear, and on Marvell's sensorium in the context of French libertine poetry and thought.