Jo Ann Cavallo

Jo Ann Cavallo (PhD, Yale, 1987) is Professor of Italian in the Italian Department of Columbia University, where she has taught since 1988 and served as Chair from 2014 to 2025. She has brought a libertarian perspective to Italian studies through publications on Marco Polo, Machiavelli, Renaissance fiction, chivalric epic, and Sicilian puppet theater. Her two latest books, The World beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto and The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884–1947): The Paladins of France in America, received multiple awards and were also published in Italian. Among her edited volumes are Speaking Truth to Power from Medieval to Modern Italy (co-edited with Carlo Lottieri), Libertarian Autobiographies: Moving toward Freedom in Today’s World (co-edited with Walter Block), and, most recently, Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism: Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor. Among the websites she created is Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism. She has been an Associated Scholar of the Mises Institute since 2012.