Scholarship and Biography

Professor Targoff teaches and studies English and Italian Renaissance literature, with emphases on lyric poetry and women's writing. She has written books on the invention of common prayer; on the works of the poet and preacher John Donne; on Renaissance love poetry; on the Italian poet Vittoria Colonna (whose 1538 Rime, the first book of poetry ever published by a woman in Italy, she also translated); and on women writers in Shakespeare's England.

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Honors

Dissertation Year Grant
National Endowment for the Humanities (United States, Washington D.C.) - NEH, 1995-1996
Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarship among Junior Faculty in the Humanities
Yale University (United States, New Haven), 2000-2001
Best Book of the Year Award
Conference on Christianity and Literature, 2001-2002
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Fellowship
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2003-2004
Fellowship
American Council of Learned Societies (United States, New York) - ACLS, 2009-2010
Scholar in Residence
American Academy in Rome (United States, New York), 2012
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (United States, New York), 2012-2013
Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize
Modern Language Association (United States, New York) - MLA, 2016
Winner of John Donne Society, Award for Best Essay of the Year, for “Marriage and Sacrifice: the poetics of the Epithalamia,”
John Donne Society, 2021
NOMIS Foundation research grant for Petrarch in Global Translation
Nomis Foundation (Switzerland, Zurich), March 2024-present

Organizational Affiliations

Jehuda Reinharz Professor in the Humanities, Department of English, Brandeis University

Co-Chair, Interdepartmental Program in Italian Studies, Brandeis University

Affiliated Faculty, Interdepartmental Program in Italian Studies, Brandeis University

Affiliated Faculty, Interdepartmental Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Brandeis University

Past Affiliations

Scholar-in-Residence, American Academy in Rome (United States, New York)

Yale University (United States, New Haven)

Education

University of California, Berkeley
Ph.D.
Yale University
B.A.