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Tom’s research examines how Francesco Petrarca redefines solitude across his corpus, with particular attention to De otio religioso and De vita solitaria. His thesis, provisionally entitled ‘Volo solitudinem non solam’ (De vita solitaria, 2.14): Petrarch’s Relational Form of Solitude, focuses on a paradox that runs through the writing: solitude repeatedly finds its fullest meaning in the company of others.

The project argues that Petrarch develops a deliberately curated practice of ‘non-alone aloneness’ (solitudinem non solam), in which withdrawal becomes a space of chosen intellectual, spiritual, and affective companionship. Petrarch’s solitude is structured by multiple modes of presence: friendship sustained both by presence and epistolary correspondence, books and ancient authors treated as interlocutors, allegorical or imagined addressees that shape self-fashioning, and divine presence as a form of interior dialogue. By tracing these forms of companionship across genres (treatise, epistle, lyric), the thesis asks how solitude becomes relational rather than simply private.

Methodologically, the thesis combines close literary analysis with intellectual history, situating Petrarch at the intersection of classical and Christian traditions. It also engages with manuscript and visual culture to consider how Petrarch is fashioned and circulated as an icon of solitude, and to gesture toward the longer Renaissance legacy of his model of withdrawal.

Conference papers

• The Prayse of Private Life: Solitude, Retreat, and the Pursuit of Virtue in Petrarch’s De vita solitaria, Clareity, March 2025
• Poena Solitudinis: Elemental Transformation and the Brutality of Loneliness in Inferno XIII, Harvard Chiasmi, April 2025
• Volo solitudinem non solam: Petrarch’s New Meaning of Solitude, Italian Graduate Conference: Encounters(ÃÜÌÒÊÓƵ Italian Division), June 2025
• Affective Withdrawal: Petrarch’s Paradox of Loving Solitude, Critical Love Studies Workshop (Faculty of English, ÃÜÌÒÊÓƵ), June 2025
• Proximity as Pleasure or Proximity as Pain? Visual Interpretations of Paolo and Francesca’s Infernal Relationship in Dante’s Canto V, Peggy Guggenheim Research Seminar, September 2025
• Haunted by Antiquity: Nostalgia and Solitude from Petrarch to de Chirico, Clareity, December 2025

Other activities and roles

Outside academia, Tom is a writer for Varsity and rows for his college.

Supervisor: Professor Anna Pegoretti