Mark Davie was Senior Lecturer in Italian and Head of the School of Modern Languages until his retirement in 2006. He was the Italian Editor of Modern Language Review, 2003-10.

He has published studies on various aspects of Italian literature, mainly in the period from Dante to the Renaissance, with a particular focus on the relations between learned and popular culture, and between Latin and the vernacular, in Italy in the Renaissance. His work on Dante includes two studies of the Fiore, a sequence of 232 sonnets written in Florence at the end of the 13th century which many scholars attribute to Dante.

His recent work has been on the Italian (as opposed to Latin) writings of Galileo. With William R. Shea, he has published a selection of Galileo’s writings  (Oxford World’s Classics, 2012), and is currently working on a new translation of Galileo’s major work, the Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, also for Oxford World’s Classics.