Students

Eero studies the history of political thought in Renaissance and early modern Europe. His current research examines the paradoxes of popular sovereignty and the theory of executive power in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century political philosophy. He holds secondary interests in early modern political theology, political Hebraism, and anti-Judaism. He has published studies of Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, and Thomas Hobbes in American Political Science Review, Political Theory, History of Political Thought, The Review of Politics, and the forthcoming Cambridge History of Democracy. Before beginning his doctorate, he received a BA in Philosophy and Political Science from the University of Chicago (2018), then taught English as a second language through Fulbright Austria's USTA Program (2018–2020). He recently held a one-year predoctoral fellowship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (2024–2025). 

eero.arum@berkeley.edu

Blake De Luca, Italian Studies

Blake’s research stems from a lifelong interest in time as an abstract entity and philosophical concept and in its relation to spatiality. It explores the development in the awareness and conceptualization of both throughout the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods in Italy (1300-1600).

Before joining the Department of Italian Studies at Berkeley, Blake received both their BA in Art History (summa cum laude) and their MA in Art History (summa cum laude) from Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. His undergraduate thesis proposed a theoretical framework for the relation between painted space and real space in fifteenth-century Italian altarpieces, while his Master’s thesis dealt with some of the iconographical derivations from the Mantegna Tarot, bringing him to study three painting cycles in Central Italy and to dive through XVI century archives.

Blake has worked at the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica in Rome, acting as a guide and project coordinator in Palazzo Barberini, and held a scholarship from the Giulio Carlo Argan library of Art History in Sapienza University, Rome. They also gained international experience by winning an Erasmus+ grant, which allowed them to spend a semester in Paris, at Sorbonne University.

Other interests include feminism and queer theory, challenging the erasure of women and queer people through the Renaissance and tracing iconographic and literary models back to their origins.
bdeluca@berkeley.edu

Christopher Geary, English

Chris’s research interests broadly concern ecological history, the history of science, the history of critical philosophy and materialist thought, and how these intellectual and material developments are formulated in and through “late” early modern British literature from the English Revolution to early Romanticism. He is particularly interested in how Enlightenment ideas of spontaneity are worked out over this long period through questions of organic, aesthetic, and political form. He joined the English program at Berkeley in 2018 after having completed his B.A. and M.A. in English at the University of Toronto.
cgeary@berkeley.edu

Caroline Godard, French

Caroline’s studies focus on sixteenth and early seventeenth century French literature, especially the Essais of Michel de Montaigne. Her research considers topics in the history of the book and of reading, affect theory, the senses (principally touch), and philosophies of community. She also has ancillary interests in art history, lexicography, and Renaissance translation theory. Before joining Berkeley’s French department in 2020, Caroline completed her undergraduate education at Miami University of Ohio and earned an MSt in Modern Languages from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.
caroline.godard@berkeley.edu

Rubina Mazurka Hovhannisyan, Music

Rubina Mazurka Hovhannisyan is interested in the multi-confessional interactions of people living in the Venetian Republic during the 17th century, both in the lagoon and throughout the extended maritime territories. She is interested in how Venice's political theories intersect with musical practice and discourse, through cultural history, musical discourse, and critical organology. 

Rubina is a PhD student in the Music Department. She is also an active performer in the Bay Area. Before coming to Berkeley, she received Bachelor of Music and Master of Arts in Vocal Performance degrees from UC Santa Cruz, and a Master of Arts in Musicology from UC Berkeley.
rubinamazurka@berkeley.edu

Hannah Katznelson, Comparative Literature

Hannah focuses on the literary construction of temporality between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries in France, England, and Italy. She is interested in how medieval literary, intellectual, and theological frameworks are modified to accommodate new and more robust senses of a historical “now” in narrative genres such as Epic, romance, and the novella. She is also interested in the rhetorical processes of moral education, and their relation to narration and narrative forms in allegory and other didactic genres. She comes to the program with a B.A. in Literature from Yale University.
hannah_katznelson@berkeley.edu

Kevin Martín, Italian Studies

Kevin’s research focuses on the linguistic history of the Romance language family, with an emphasis on Italian. Currently, he is examining the role the Italian language played in building and disseminating conceptions of otherness in the Horn of Africa from the Age of Discovery in the Early Modern period to Italy’s subsequent colonial empire (1885-1941). His approach is interdisciplinary, and incorporates methods from (Historical) Sociolinguistics and Translation Studies. Kevin comes to the program with a double B.A. in Linguistics and Italian Studies from UC Santa Cruz, as well as experience in foreign language education and business localization. k.martin@berkeley.edu

Kyle Martin, History

Kyle’s research focuses on early modern religious, intellectual, and political thought. He researches the relationship between Biblical history and the history of the Bible, as well as political and religious thought in Europe during the long afterlife of the Protestant Reformation. Recently, his research has turned to late humanism and neo-Latin Biblical commentaries in the mid 17th century, especially the Biblical Annotationes of the Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius. His broader research interests cluster around early modern Intellectual and religious history, and include the history of Christianity and Jewish-Christian relations, the history of the book, early Reformed theology, and the development of historical and legal thought within the Calvinist Confession in the 16th and 17th centuries. He joined the history department at Berkeley in 2022, after receiving his bachelor’s degree in history from Baylor University and his master’s degree in history from Yale.
kyle_martin@berkeley.edu

Kevin Ogunniyi, English

Kevin’s study has centered on Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, particularly on the nexus between aesthetics, ethics, representation, and performance, in the tragedies of the period. He works always to descry what literature teaches readers and spectators about how we live and how we ought to live. Subsidiary interests include: the histories of literary criticism and Classical reception; “pre-modern” humanist and other anthropologies; character criticism; critical theory; continental European Romances and romances; (what seems like) the theatre’s (and literature’s) capacities to outstrip life and to fall short of life.
kogunniyi@berkeley.edu

Sakura Price, English

Sakura focuses on 16th and 17th century English poetry. She is interested in the formal means by which early modern poets registered changes in social-property relations, and engaged with contemporary legal and philosophical literature invested in theorizing or defining ‘property.’ She is also broadly interested in Renaissance visual culture as well as English linguistic history and grammatical structure. Before joining the English department at Berkeley, Sakura received an A.B. in English and Humanistic Studies from Princeton University.

Gabriela C. Rodríguez, Spanish & Portuguese

Gabriela C. “Gabi” Rodríguez is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Renaissance & Early Modern Studies. Her dissertation examines the representations of the natural world across literary genres in the Early Modern Spanish Empire and their ties to religion and Greco-Roman mythology as well as environmental change, medicine, and empire-building. More broadly, she is interested in Renaissance and Baroque lyric, ecocriticism, and the pastoral tradition. Her article on trees and amorous lament in Garcilaso de la Vega’s poetry is forthcoming in Calíope.

Krishna Shekhawat, History of Art

Arya Sureshbabu, English

Arya’s primary interests cluster around questions of self-reflexivity, marginality, and temporality in early modern English drama and lyric. More tangentially, she is also fascinated by generic instability, different modes of unknowability, precursors to post-critique, and postcolonial appropriations of Renaissance texts. Prior to joining the graduate program, Arya completed her BA in English at UC Berkeley.
aryasureshbabu@berkeley.edu

Gemma Tronfi, Italian Studies

Tessa Whittle, Philosophy

Tessa entered the PhD program in Philosophy in 2025. She is interested primarily in systematic rationalist philosophy in the early modern period, the early modern rejections and revivals of scholastic ideas, and in the history of ethics. She has metaphysical interests in space and substance, and ethical interests in virtue, emotions and normativity. Figures she would like to work on include Descartes, Cavendish, Spinoza, and Leibniz.
twhittle@berkeley.edu