Leah Whittington
Biography
Leah Whittington is Professor of English in the Department of English and Affiliate of the Department of Classics at Harvard University. She specializes in the literature and culture of the European Renaissance, with a focus on the survival, transmission, and transformation of classical antiquity. Her first book, Renaissance Suppliants: Poetry, Antiquity, Reconciliation (Oxford, 2016) studies supplication as a social and literary event in the long European Renaissance, showing how Renaissance writers use postures of humiliation and abjection to think through problems of estrangement, difference, and inequality. Her second book, Antiquity Made Whole (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming) is about the role of supplements and continuations in Renaissance literary culture, broadly defined as texts that announce themselves as adding to, carrying forward, or finishing other texts. After receiving a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University in 2011, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia Society of Fellows in the Humanities before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2012. She is also currently Associate Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library at Harvard University Press.