Shannon McHugh

Shannon McHugh is the Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences at The Huntington and Associate Professor of French and Italian at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on early modern literature and gender, with emphases including lyric poetry, the Counter-Reformation, and the history of participatory fan culture. Her new book, 'Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy' (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), examines how men and women of the Italian Renaissance used poetry to construct new, fluid, and sometimes radical gendered possibilities. At The Huntington, she is researching her second book, studying the history of women’s reproductive bodies by comparing early modern medical texts’ depictions of childbearing, pregnancy loss, birth, and nursing with those found in poetry by men and women from Italy and France. Her research has taken her to places ranging from the Vatican Secret Archives to the Walt Disney Imagineering Library.