Catherine S. Bloomer is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Brandeis University and an Assistant Editor of Digital Dante. She previously served as Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in Italian Studies at Villanova University and held the Florence Levy Kay Fellowship in Premodern Disability Studies at Brandeis.
She received her Ph.D. in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2023 with a dissertation examining how Dante conceptualizes physical disability within theological, medical, and civic frameworks. At Columbia, she taught courses in the Italian Department and in the Columbia Core Curriculum, for which she received the Preceptor Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate instruction. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The New School, where she co-founded the arts education program WriteOn NYC. Catherine graduated cum laude from Barnard College; her undergraduate period includes study at the Università di Bologna.
Her research focuses on Italian literature and critical disability studies, with particular attention to the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. She investigates how premodern literary texts theorize embodiment, care, and ethical vulnerability through medical, devotional, and social-historical frameworks.
She is currently completing her first book, Blameless Defect: A Dantean Model of Disability, which argues that Dante articulates an ethics of care that treats disability as a morally neutral and relational condition rather than a sin or deficit. In addition to her work on Dante, she conducts digital-humanities research as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Petrarch in Global Translation initiative, where her project, “Disabled Love: Petrarchism and the Global Poetics of Embodied Disruption,” maps metaphors of disability across Petrarch’s lyric corpus and its translations through close reading and TEI encoding.
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