Assistant Professor Irene Zanini-Cordi, who studies Italian women writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, has received a $50,400 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Irene Zanini-Cordi has proven to be outstanding in every aspect of her profession, as a teacher, a scholar, and a departmental/university citizen,” said William Cloonan, FSU’s Richard Chapple Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics and chair of the department.

She plans to use the funding for research in Italy for her second book, Fashioning Italian Women, Fashioning a Nation: Sociability and Women’s Identity (1780s-1860s).

“My first book explored the topic of abandoned women in Italian literature from the Renaissance to the present,” she said. “My new research, meanwhile, focuses on the social network of the 19th century, the Italian salon. Women writers of the era were connected in a web of social intercourse through salon gatherings, letters, and literary dialogue that could be thought of as a predecessor of Facebook.”

Zanini-Cordi joined the FSU faculty in 2005 after earning her Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley.

“These are highly competitive fellowships,” said Dean Joseph Travis, “and it is not often that a younger scholar emerges from this competition above the applications of more established scholars. That alone tells you how good Professor Zanini-Cordi really is.” To learn more, go to http://www.fsu.edu/news/2011/01/27/humanities.honor/