Nicole Ferrari

Visiting Assistant Professor in French and Italian

• Ph.D. in Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies Department (University of Pennsylvania)

Nicole Ferrari's research interests focus on intersections between French and Italian nineteenth-century literature and Ordinary Language Philosophy. She analyzes philosophical and ontological skepticism in the ancien régime and representations of republics in Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. She investigates how the Enlightenment notions of the virtues, the human, and classical and modern republics shaped Italian and French authors’ visions of governance, the good, and justice in the nineteenth century. She is currently researching the legacy of Renaissance theorist Niccolò Machiavelli in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French republican thought.

Research Interests: 

• Victor Hugo and Alessandro Manzoni
• Ordinary Language Philosophy
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, J. L. Austin
• Classical and modern republics
• The French Revolution 
• Italian and French Enlightenment
• Natural Law and justice
• Caribbean and African Francophone literature