Laurie Shepard

associate professor, Italian, Boston College

Laurie Shepard is an Associate Professor of Italian at Boston College. Her specialty is Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, with a particular focus on lyric poetry, rhetoric, and historical linguistics. An English major at Wesleyan University, she pursued graduate studies in Medieval Romance Literature at Boston College and La Sapienza in Rome. She has edited troubadour lyrics in Bruckner, M., Shepard, L., and White, S.,* Songs of the Women Troubadours* (1995), and published a book on Medieval Latin political rhetoric, entitled, *Courting Power: Persuasion and Politics in the Early Thirteenth Century*. (1999). She is currently working on a book about the family as it is protrayed in Renaissance comedy. In February 2000, she began a public reading of the *Divine Comedy* at Boston College, which is now at the midpoint of the *Comedy*. Laurie Shepard lives with her husband, two sons, and a dog in Newton, Massachusetts. She enjoys the Italian language, cooking and eating with family and friends, discussing politics, reading, music, gardening, and hiking.