Shannon McHugh
Shannon McHugh, the assistant director of research, came to The Huntington from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she was associate professor of French and Italian.
A specialist in Italian and French Renaissance literature and gender, McHugh is the author of Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy (Amsterdam University Press, 2023). As the 2023–24 Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at The Huntington, she conducted research on her project “Women’s Reproductive Lives in Renaissance Lyric Poetry.” McHugh is also working on a book about Walt Disney’s library, a project stemming from a Huntington U course that she taught in conjunction with the 2022–23 exhibition “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts.”
McHugh helps connect the research of Huntington fellows with broader audiences while making connections between The Huntington’s historical collections and the present.
Publications
This book is a new history of early modern gender, told through the lyric poetry of Renaissance Italy. In the evolution of Western gender roles, the Italian Renaissance was a watershed moment, when a confluence of cultural developments disrupted centuries of Aristotelian, binary thinking. Men and women living through this upheaval exploited Petrarchism’s capacity for subjective expression and experimentation - as well as its status as the most accessible of genres - in order to imagine new gendered possibilities in realms such as marriage, war, and religion. One of the first studies to examine writing by early modern Italian men and women together, it is also a revolutionary testament to poetry’s work in the world. These poets’ works challenge the traditional boundaries drawn around lyric’s utility. They show us how poems could be sites of resistance against the pervading social order - how they are texts capable not only of recording social history, but also of shaping it.
