Elisa Cozzi
Dr Elisa Cozzi specialises in Irish, British, and Italian literary culture in the Romantic period. Her work examines the circulation of manuscript material, radical ideas, and literary influence across European coteries.
During her NEH Fellowship, Dr Cozzi is working on a book-length study of Irish–Italian literary and cultural exchanges. Italy and the Irish Romantics: Irish–Italian Networks, Narratives, and Manuscript Culture, 1785–1835 argues for Italianism as an essential current in Irish Romanticism, permeating all strata of Irish culture—from the eighteenth-century antiquarian tradition to the literary nationalism of the nineteenth century—and linking Ireland’s cultural geography to the centre of Revolutionary Europe. The book uncovers the previously unexamined papers of the Irish members of the Byron–Shelley circle in Pisa, including Margaret Mount Cashell, George William Tighe, and John Taaffe. The poems, novels, correspondence, and diaries that have come to light in the archives of their descendants provide crucial evidence for the pervasive use of Italian culture to forge Irish Romanticism.
Alongside her first monograph, Dr Cozzi will begin a second research project at the University of Notre Dame, ‘The Irish Idea: Ireland and British Romanticism, 1798–1829’, which explores how Irish ideas helped define debates about nationhood and identity in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing for their centrality to a broader archipelagic understanding of London’s literary culture. By uncovering Ireland’s role at the centre British literary and political life, the project sheds new light on the intertwined histories of the two nations and connects past debates on sovereignty and belonging to present-day questions about borders, migration, and the legacy of empire.
Dr Cozzi is one of four editors of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a three-volume edition of Shelley’s letters under contract with Oxford University Press, containing all known letters edited from manuscripts according to an innovative textual methodology (with volumes scheduled for publication in 2027, 2030, and 2036). Her articles and reviews are published or forthcoming in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, The Byron Journal, The Keats-Shelley Review, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. She has two commissioned chapters currently in preparation, one on Leopardi’s European reception and another for The Oxford Handbook of Romantic Poetry.
Dr Cozzi completed her doctorate in English at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, funded by a Baillie Gifford scholarship and the Clarendon Fund. She received her BA from the University of York and her MSt from Oxford. She has held early-career visiting fellowships at the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen (2025), and at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, Queen Mary University of London (2023).
Dr Cozzi has taught a range of classes and supervised dissertations at undergraduate and master’s levels in English and Irish literature from 1660 to the present. Her wider research interests include Irish Romanticism; the Byron–Shelley circle; Anglo-Italian literature; literary networks in the long eighteenth century; manuscript culture and the digital humanities; and literary influence and allusion.
If you would like to contact Dr Cozzi, you can reach her at ecozzi@nd.edu.