Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Ambra Marzocchi is International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Classics and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, with an affiliation with the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World. Trained as a classical philologist in Italy and as a historian of the book in the United States, she specializes in the study of the history of scholarship and humanist education in early colonial Spanish America. Her current research seeks to advance the understanding of the cultural-historical dynamics surrounding the early modern transmission of Greco-Roman, pagan, and Christian literatures, through humanistic — and specifically Jesuit — pedagogy, from Europe to colonial Mexico. For her doctoral work at Johns Hopkins University, she edited and studied the first textbook of Latin poetry printed in the Americas. At Brown, she plans to expand her analysis to a wider array of Latin textbooks used in colonial Mexico, many of which are preserved in the University’s bibliographic collections. Her teaching philosophy is inspired by tenets of Renaissance educational treatises, which she put into practice at the University of Kentucky’s Institutum Studiis Latinis Provehendis. In 2022 she was elected Fellow of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance associated with Johns Hopkins University.