A specialist in Renaissance literature, Jane Tylus is a Professor in the Department of Italian Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University's Humanities Center (1985) and her B.A. from the College of William and Mary. Prior to coming to NYU, she was Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and for four years she was the Associate Dean for the Humanities. Her publications include Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (Stanford, 1993) and Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World (California, 1999), which she co-edited. Dr. Tylus is editor of the early modern volume for the new Longman Anthology of World Literature and is a recent recipient of the award for best translation from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women for her Sacred Narratives of Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici (University of Chicago Press, 2001). She has also contributed articles to edited volumes and numerous scholarly journals, including Renaissance Quarterly, Italian Culture and Renaissance Drama. Her current work focuses on late medieval female spirituality and its connection to the emergence of humanism, and she is also working on a translation of the complete poems of the Italian Renaissance poet Gaspara Stampa.