Guido Ruggiero

Professor and Chair
Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles (1972);
Professor

e-mail: gruggiero@miami.edu
Office: Rm. 619 Ashe
Phone: (305) 284-3660

 Guido Ruggiero, Professor and Chair of the Department of History, was born in Danbury, Connecticut and grew up in Webster, New York, a small rural town along the old shore line of Lake Ontario. After earning a B.A. with a heavy focus on ancient history and philosophy at the University of Colorado, he went on to UCLA where as a University of California Regent's Intern Fellow he earned an M.A. (1967) and a Ph.D. (1972). As a Regent's Fellow he began his long love affair with Venice and the Venetian Archives in 1970 and has been returning there for his research ever since.

      Professor Ruggiero has published on the history of gender, sex, crime, magic, science and everyday culture, primarily in renaissance and early modern Italy. Early in his career he focused on social science history, but his interests have expanded toward yet more interdisciplinary approaches, including microhistory, narrative history, and the melding of literature, literary criticism, and archival history. Among other volumes he has published Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (1980), The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (1985), Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power from the End of the Renaissance (1993), Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self and Society in Renaissance Italy (2007); as well as Sex and Gender in Historical Perspectives (1990), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (1991), and History from Crime (1993), edited with Edward Muir. In addition he has edited The Blackwell Companion to the Renaissance (2002) and Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (2003) edited and translated with Laura Giannetti. He also edited the series Studies in the History of Sexuality (1985-2002) for Oxford University Press and was a co-editor of the six volume Encyclopedia of European Social History for Scribner's (2002).  He is currently working on a general history of the Italian Renaissance. In addition to being a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (1981-82; 1991) and a Fellow at Harvard's Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy (1990-1991) he has won a number of grants and fellowships including a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1990).   Ruggiero regularly teaches classes on the Italian Renaissance, the new social and cultural history, and the uses of literature for history.