URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Winter_2015_Melissa-McCarthy

search for Carriera’s letters in Italy has taken her to archives in Florence, Venice, and a cloistered convent in Modena. She also plans to visit libraries in Rome and Paris. Sama’s fluency in Italian and French allows her access to the world of 18th-century European correspondence networks. Sama’s book onCarriera, Correspondence of an 18th Century Venetian Artist (co- translated with Julia Kisacky of Baylor University), is commissioned for “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” book series at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and Victoria University at the University of Toronto. The series publishes scholarly editions in English of European women’s writing from the 14th through 18th centuries. Sama will pen a new biography of Carriera that will introduce a selection of fully annotated letters from Carriera’s correspondence. Sama sees her project as part of the digital humanities, the creative use of information technology to enhance research and outreach in the humanities. She is creating a searchable database of Carriera’s correspondence to accompany the book, which will include scanned images of the original handwritten letters. She also plans to add links to reproductions of Carriera’s artwork along with more than 160 of her correspondents. Women Impact ing Male Dominated Fields Carriera joins the list of other Italian women Sama has studied. Her first book, Selected Writings of an Eighteenth-Century Woman of Letters (2003), explored the career of Elisabetta Caminer Turra (1751- 1796), a Venetian journalist who founded her own periodical in the years just prior to the French Revolution and translated and published French dramas and essays for Italian audiences. Caminer, like Carriera, was highly successful in a field—journalism—that

Luisa Bergalli

Most of Carriera’s correspondence is gathered in a Florence library, but the vast majority are letters written to her rather than by her. Sama hopes to change that perspective. “I am interested in finding as yet undiscovered extant letters in her own hand to get her side of the story,” she says.

She began painting the ivory lids of snuffboxes in oil and tempera, and these miniature portraits and allegories soon became recognized works of art, especially once she began painting them on small pieces of ivory independently of the more functional snuffboxes. Most of her career was then dedicated to creating larger portraits and allegories in pastel on paper.

Like a detective following leads, Sama’s

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