Frank Pellicone

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.