DrLuca Sanseverino

Luca Sanseverino is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow (Research Ireland) in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at University College Dublin. His project, The Performance of Power and the Power of Performance: Cultural Practices as Political Agency in Renaissance Naples, asks how poetry, theater, festivals and print allowed early modern communities to act on the powers that ruled them. It treats these works as instruments of negotiation between cities, patrons, authors and sovereigns. Its case study is Charles V’s stay in Naples in 1535–36, when the city addressed the emperor through poetry, theater, ceremony and print alike.

He received his PhD from the Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples in 2026 with a dissertation on European Petrarchism, which he approached through the history of the sonnet and versification in Italian, French, Spanish and English poetry. Before joining UCD he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fondation Barbier-Mueller pour l’étude de la poésie italienne de la Renaissance in Geneva. He has been a visiting researcher at New York University, the Freie Universität Berlin and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

He has written on Renaissance poetics, on the exchanges between Italian and French lyric traditions, and on early twentieth-century Italian poetry. His first monograph, Il verso libero in Italia (1888–1918), appeared with Mimesis in 2024.