Mary Watt is interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of Italian in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. She began the appointment as interim dean on July 1, 2024. Previously in the Dean’s Office, she was associate dean with responsibility for faculty affairs, undergraduate concerns, the African American Studies Program, the Center for African Studies, the Center for European Studies, and the Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies.
Watt holds a Ph.D. in Italian studies and a J.D., both from the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research focuses on medieval and early modern Italian literature and culture, with a particular focus on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Her work has been supported by the Rothman Endowment for the Humanities, the Municipality of Ravenna, Italy, and the University of Oslo’s Norwegian Institute in Rome. She is the author of more than 50 journal articles, book chapters, and translations. She has served as a review editor of Speculum, the journal of the American Medieval Academy. Watt has been a Goggio Chair Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto and has given talks at multiple universities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She is the author of The Cross that Dante Bears: Pilgrimage, Crusade, and the Cruciform Church in the Divine Comedy (University Press of Florida, 2005); Dante, Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition: Spiritual Imperialism in the Italian Imagination (Routledge, 2017); and Dante’s Golden Legend: Auto-hagiography in the Divine Comedy (Mercer University Press, 2021).