During Winter quarter, Associate Professor of Italian, Susan Gaylard held the Charles Speroni Endowed Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature and Italian Culture in the Department of European Languages & Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. This endowed visiting chairship is an honor bestowed on outstanding faculty in medieval and Renaissance Italian studies. The position was created for Charles Speroni (1911-1984) who was the founder and first chairman of the Department of Italian at UCLA (1949-1956), Dean of the College of Fine Arts, UCLA (1968-1979), and he served as editor of the journal The Italian Quarterly.
Professor Gaylard's research and teaching focus on the intersection of literary, material, and political culture, from Petrarch’s coin-collecting to the collections of Dolce e Gabbana. She is currently completing Beautiful Monsters, a pan-European project explaining the erasure or modification of images of women in 16th-century printed books. Professor Gaylard’s third book, Cinderella’s Fashion, correlates Italian anxieties about dress with socio-political developments, and nuances prevailing theories of the meaning of fashion by incorporating the history of race-making, from Boccaccio to the present.
Besides enjoying sunshine and swimming pools, Prof. Gaylard did archival work at the Huntington Library, gave a public lecture, and taught two courses. One of these, which asks the question “What is beauty?” will be the foundation for a new jointly listed FRENCH/ITAL course in winter quarter 2023 here at the UW. Her other course at UCLA, “Fashioning fashion,” extended Prof. Gaylard’s research on the intersection of early modern fashion with race-making.