Episode 52: Bryan Brazeau GSAS '15 PhD Italian Studies, Faculty member w/ cohost Chase Lau (RA in Second Street)

Dr. Bryan Brazeau is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Liberal Arts at the University of Warwick (UK). He began at NYU as a graduate student in Italian Studies working with residential life (first on the Graduate Programming Initiative, and then as an RA in Stuy Town from 2009-2012). He obtained his Ph.D. in Italian Studies from NYU in 2015 and his MA in the same field from NYU in 2010. Prior to his arrival at NYU, Bryan obtained a BA in Western Society and Culture from Concordia University’s Liberal Arts College in Montréal in 2008. Bryan is currently editing a volume of essays on new perspectives in the study of early modern poetics, Beyond Aristotle's Poetics: New Directions in Early Modern Italian Literary Criticism—which emerges from a conference and graduate workshop that he organized at the Newberry Library in March 2017.

As Senior Teaching Fellow in Liberal Arts at Warwick, Bryan teaches interdisciplinary courses such as Science, Society, and the Media; Underworlds; Paradises; and Sustaining the Serenissima: Venice and Sustainability (which includes a week at Warwick’s campus in Venice). As Study Abroad co-ordinator for the department, he also maintains and oversees exchange partnerships with international institutions in the Netherlands, Germany, and Canada. At Warwick, he has co-created programs such as the Early Career Convivium, and maintains the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance Podcast. Prior to his current role, Bryan served as Research Fellow at Warwick on a project funded by the European Research Council titled “Aristotle in the Vernacular,” with project teams at Warwick and at Ca’ Foscari in Venice. As part of his work on the project, he worked on the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in early modern Italy, carried out the legacy migration of the Aristotle in the Vernacular Database and collaborated on an exhibition of early modern Aristotelian texts Aristotele e Venezia at the Museo Correr and Marciana Library in Venice. During this time, he also taught graduate-level seminar courses: Latin for Researchers; Early Modern Palaeography; and lectured on undergraduate courses such as Defining France; and The Epic Tradition. As part of this teaching, he helped organise field trips to the Bodleian Library (Oxford), and the British Library (London).

Bryan has published several articles and book reviews in journals including MLN, Renaissance and Reformation, The Italianist, California Italian Studies, and History of European Ideas. His essays have appeared in collections such as Dante and Heterodoxy, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone (2014), and MLA Approaches to Teaching the Italian Renaissance Romance Epic (2018). He is also working on his first book, Hero of the Day: The Development of Christian Epic in Sixteenth-Century Italy.