Jo Ann Cavallo is Professor and current Chair of the Department of Italian at Columbia University. Her latest book, The World beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto, received a Modern Language Association Publication Award and was translated into Italian. She is also the author of The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure and Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato: An Ethics of Desire, and has published articles on Italian authors from the medieval to the modern period and on popular traditions that dramatize epic narratives (Sicilian puppet theater and the epic maggio of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines). She is editor of Teaching the Italian Renaissance Romance Epic, co-editor of Fortune and Romance: Boiardo in America and Speaking Truth to Power from Medieval to Modern Italy, founding editor of the book series Anthem World Epic and Romance, and Italian literature area editor of The Literary Encyclopedia (www.LitEncyc.com). She also continues to develop her website eBOIARDO (Epics of Boiardo and Other Italian Authors: a Research Database Online) at edblogs.columbia.edu/eboiardo.