Victor Hainagiu

My research focuses on the Mediterranean’s overdetermined geography in Renaissance imagination. Through study of dramas and travelogues, I examine issues of religious conversion and cultural mutability tied to contemporary anxieties regarding Ottoman expansionism. I am especially interested in the influence of classical narratives on early modern Orientalist representations of the Islamic world, particularly discourses of Venus and the Trojan tradition. My current work argues that such representations often drew on older criticisms of Petrarchan devotion by associating the poetic idolatry of love with the perceived idolatry of Islam.