Aria Dal Molin is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of South Carolina. She holds a Ph.D. in French and Italian, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an M.A. from the University of Oregon, in Romance Languages and Literatures. Her scholarly interests lie in the areas of sex and gender in the sixteenth-century literary academies, anticlassicism in the comedies of the late Renaissance, and transnational mobility in the early modern theater of Italy and France. She has published scholarly journal articles and chapters on Machiavelli, Ariosto, and sixteenth-century literary academies in Siena.  Her first book, Early Modern Italian Bromance: Love, Friendship, and Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Italian Academies resituates the contemporary term, bromance, and its surrounding cultural discourse in the theater of sixteenth-century early modern Italian academies to demonstrate how young accademicians sought both to institutionalize and prolong male bonding as a means of escapism from their contemporary social and political concerns.

She teaches upper-division and graduate-level courses in Italian literature and Comparative Literature including Classics of Literary Theory and Criticism (CPLT 701/ENGL 733), The Italian Love Lyric (ITAL 405), Counter-cultural Italian Civilization (ITAL 400), Great Books of the Western World I (CPLT 301/ENGL 390), Great Books of the Western World II (CPLT 302/ENGL 391), and Twentieth Century Italian Literature ((ITAL 404).  She also has created a series of special topics courses for the Italian program curriculum including The Italian Novella, Machiavelli and Renaissance Florence, TEATROMANIA: Italian Theater Practicum, Cercasi Umore: Understanding Italian Humor, and Laughter and Humor in Early Modern Europe (CPLT 415/FREN398).