Serena Laiena

Serena Laiena is Assistant Professor in Italian and Ad Astra Fellow at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on early modern Italian theatre, especially commedia dell’arte. Most of her time is devoted to the understanding of the social and cultural role of the first professional actresses in modern history. She is the author of the award-winning monograph The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing (University of Delaware Press, 2023), which investigates the birth of a phenomenon – the couple in show business – in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italy. Currently, she is working on a book-length project focusing on the correspondence by and about professional actresses to bring to light the managing roles they performed within theatre companies.