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Born in Genoa in 1968, Stefano Villani (who graduated in Philosophy from the University of Pisa in 1993) completed a Ph.D. in History at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in 1999, with a thesis on the history of the relations between Britain and Italy during the Interregnum.
Associate Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Pisa, Stefano Villani has coordinated and taken part in numerous research projects and since 1990 received grants and scholarships by several institutions (Folger Shakespeare Library, Accademia dei Lincei – British Academy, Catholic Record Society, Italienisch Deutsches Historisches Institut of the Istituto Trentino di Cultura at Trento, Fondazione Cini of Venice). In 2009-10 he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library and in 2006 a John D. and Rose H. Jackson Post-Doctoral Research Fellows at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Yale. In 2000 he won the prize Onofrio Nicastro for research in the political, cultural and religious history of England in the seventeenth century.
His research has been characterized by an interdisciplinary approach that interweaves philosophical and literary topics with the more usual historical ones. His early research was oriented towards the cultural and religious English history of the seventeenth century (his MA dissertation was on Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers) – and he has worked on the Quaker missions in the Mediterranean and published numerous articles and books in this area. More recently he has worked on the religious history of the English community in Leghorn and on the Italian translations of the Book of Common Prayer.
Among his publications, we can mention the books: Tremolanti e papisti (1996); Il calzolaio quacchero e il finto cadì (2001); A True Account of the Great Tryals and Cruel SufferingsUndergone by Those Two Faithful Servants of God, Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers. La vicenda di due quacchere prigioniere dell'inquisizione di Malta (2003); George Frederick Nott (1768-1841). Un ecclesiastico anglicano tra teologia, letteratura, arte, archeologia, bibliofilia e collezionismo (2012). He is now working on a research project on Seventeenth-Century English Translations of Italian Books.
As well as the books mentioned above, he has published about 60 essays in various journals and in edited volumes. He has coordinated a research group in the Scuola Normale Superiore on Anglo-Italian relationships in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and organized two international conferences, respectively on English history between the 1500s and 1600s: politics and culture in England (2002) and on English Stories: England seen from Italy between history and novel (2003). The proceedings of these two conferences have been published by the Scuola Normale Superiore in 2003 (2nd revised edition 2006) and 2011 (Storie inglesi. L’Inghilterra vista dall’Italia tra storia e romanzo). He has spoken in numerous conferences and since 1998 he has been invited to speak at more than twenty cultural institutions, including the Institute of Historical Research, London (2007, 2010), the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid (2010), the Center for Early Modern Studies at Oxford (2010), the Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail, Toulouse (2009) and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (2006). He has been part of the Pisa group that organized the series of colloquia financed by the British Academy on British-Italian Cultural Transactions (2006-2008). He is one of the organizer of the Research Group in Early Modern Religious Dissents & Radicalism.