Early Modern English literature: language, rhetoric, and power. Religious radicals of the English Revolution, gender rhetoric, literature and religion; epistolography; language and epistemology. My publications in this field include a monograph on gender rhetoric between 1580 and 1640, a number of articles on political and religious controversial literature, the translation into Italian and editing of John Foxe’s account of Anne Askew’s examinations and execution, and a book on the writings of the religious radicals of the English Revolution. A more recent branch of research in early modern literature regards epistolography, and in particular Elizabeth I’s foreign correspondence. I was part of an international and interdisciplinary research team who studied Elizabeth I’s Italian, French and English letters (some of them unpublished) from a philological, rhetorical, linguistic and historical point of view. I lately approached Thomas Coryat’s travel writings, an investigation which fits into my constant interest for the different prose styles of the early modern period – yet free from the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century neoclassical attempts at systematization. The same can be said for my latest research, the writings of Sir Thomas Browne: I examined his language and his epistemological outlook in his outstanding catalogue of human errors, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646). Forthcoming is my Preface to a critical edition and translation into Italian of some of George Herbert's poems (from The Temple). (1997 - )

South African literature in English. The starting point was a thorough analysis of J.M. Coetzee’s writings. Later, I extended my investigation of the relationship between South African narrative and history/epistemology to the writings of Zakes Mda, André Brink, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Sindiwe Magona, Herbert Dhlomo and Zoë Wicomb. I am now broadening my field of research to the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. I am investigating the cultural influence of English and American religious missions on South African literature. Currently, I am doing research and publishing on H.I.E. Dhlomo and his times. (2005 - )