Isabella is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI). Her research stands at the intersection between digital philology and digital editing, text and data analysis, cultural analytics, digital archives, mediaeval and early modern studies, mercantile and transcultural mediaeval cultures.

Before joining DHI, Isabella was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the HathiTrust Research Center (2021-2022) where she managed five digital humanities projects that tell the story of historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities. Previously she worked as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-2019) at the Center for Renaissance Studies, Newberry Research Library – Chicago IL, where she collaborated in creating the Italian Paleography project and as Postdoctoral Associate in Italian and Digital Humanities at Rutgers University (2019-2021), teaching and researching at the intersection between Italian studies, Medieval and Renaissance literature and cultures and digital scholarship. Isabella completed my PhD in Italian and Medieval Studies with a focus on digital humanities in 2017 at Indiana University, Bloomington (USA).

Isabella is co-principal investigator of the Petrarchive (a digital edition of Francesco Petrarca’s songbook) and editor of Italian Paleography (a digital project to learn and teach how to read and contextualize historical primary sources and manuscript). She is currently working on a digital edition of the Albizi Memorial Book and a monograph on forms and textualities of Medieval memorial books. Isabella recently co-edited a volume on Interpretation and visual poetics in Medieval and Early Modern texts (Brill, 2021) and edited a special issue on Digital Paleography for the Early Modern Digital Review. She serve as the first Digital Editor of Textual Cultures, The Journal of The Society for Textual Scholarship.

Research Interests

  • Digital archives
  • Text and data analysis 
  • AI, computer vision and manuscript studies 
  • Digital editing
  • Digital philology
  • Digital palaeography
  • Textual studies
  • History of the book
  • Medieval and early modern texts
  • Translation studies
  • Premodern mercantile cultures
  • Women writers