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David Lummus specializes in late medieval and early modern Italian literature and intellectual history. His research and teaching interests include fourteenth-century literature in Latin and the vernacular, Renaissance Humanism, medieval and early modern mythography, and the pastoral tradition. He explores critical approaches such as reception theory and actor-network theory, and has experience in literary translation. He has written various articles on fourteenth-century Italian literature and intellectual culture and has translated diverse twentieth-century Italian poets. He is currently completing his first book, The City of Poetry, which addresses the nature of the humanist revival of the classical past by examining the political function of the proto-humanist defense of poetry, in the works of Albertino Mussato, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Coluccio Salutati. It argues that the defense of poetry was key to how poets imagined and established a role for themselves in the civic sphere. Between 2008-2012, he was Assistant Professor of Italian at Yale University, and in 2009-2010 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame. He currently serves on the Modern Language Association's Executive Committee for Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature.