Walter Stephens

WALTER STEPHENS joined the Hopkins faculty in 1999 as the Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies. Holding doctorates in both comparative literature and philosophy, he studies the intersection of theology, philosophy, and literature in the culture of late medieval and early modern Europe, with particular emphasis on Italy. His books include Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (1989; forthcoming in French translation) and Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. A visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2004-2005, he is at work on books tentatively entitled Pope Noah’s Etruscans: Archeology, Forgery, and Imagination in Renaissance Italy and Antediluvian Books and Lost Encyclopedias: The Lure of the Unreadable from Antiquity to Present. Dr. Stephens is a member of the executive board of the Singleton Center for the Study of Pre-Modern Europe at Johns Hopkins, and a cofounder of Great Books: The Western Tradition, an interdisciplinary team-taught undergraduate course in the Humanities, begun in 2003.