Steven J. Baker

Steven Baker received his BA in Italian from Columbia University in 2003. After collaborating with the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, an arts organization based in Umbertide (Umbria, Italy), he worked in the production division at Abrams Books. In 2005, he returned to Columbia to enter the graduate program in Italian and Comparative Literature (M.A., 2006; M.Phil., 2008; Ph.D., 2013).

While at Columbia he has continued to work in publishing. For four years, he helped to produce the "Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook" (ERSY), under the direction of Prof. Kathy Eden, and he is currently Managing Editor of the "Italian Poetry Review" (IPR), a plurilingual journal of creativity and criticism, edited by Paolo Valesio and Alessandro Polcri and published by the Società Editrice Fiorentina (Sef) in Florence. He is also a prolific and widely published translator of academic, historical, and literary texts from Italian into English, as well as from English into Italian.

Steven has five years of experience in Italian language instruction at both the Elementary and Intermediate levels. Since 2010, he has taught in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University, where he is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Italian. He has also taught at Barnard College and holds an adjunct faculty position in the Department of Applied Undergraduate Studies (DAUS) at New York University (NYU).

Areas of specialization: Intellectual History, Late Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature, Political Philosophy and Theory, the Philosophical and Literary Discourse of Friendship, Neo-Latin Literary History, the Rhetorical Tradition, Chivalric Romance and the Epic Tradition, Translation Studies and Italian Language Instruction.

Courses he teaches include Introduction to Italian Literature I and II (taught entirely in Italian), Literature Humanities (Lit Hum), Contemporary Civilization (CC), Core as Praxis, Foundations of Philosophical Thought, Contemporary Global Literature, Critical Thinking, Major Authors: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Major Authors: Elena Ferrante, Italian Cultural Studies: From Unification to World War I, Advanced Italian Conversation, Intermediate Italian Conversation, Intermediate Italian I and II, and Elementary Italian I and II.