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Frank Pellicone

Harrison College House M11
215-573-3539

Frank Pellicone is the House Dean of Harrison College House, the largest of Penn’s academic residences.  He earned his BA in both English and Italian from Cornell University and his PhD from Yale University.  His academic work prior to coming to Penn focused primarily upon Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature, with particular emphasis on tracing the trajectory of Roman aesthetics from antiquity to the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.  While at Penn he has furthered his interest in Italian Renaissance Drama and its connections to Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, with particular interest in the ways that authors such as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Webster used Italy as a backdrop to stage their ideas of gender roles, sexual orientations, class, and other matters of play and politics in their performances.  He has written on Horace’s influence in Dante’s Vita Nuova and the Commedia as well as the theatrical works of Aretino and Machiavelli.

Courses Taught

spring 2022

ENGL 231.401 The Stages of Italian Theatre canceled  

spring 2017

ENGL 015.401 Blood, Sweat, and Pasta canceled  

spring 2016

ENGL 015.402 Blood, Sweat, and Pasta  

spring 2015

spring 2013

fall 2006

spring 2006

spring 2005

ENGL 226.301 Topics in Drama to 1660