Jessica DeMarco-Jacobson

Jessica DeMarco-Jacobson (she/her) is an MA student who researches nineteenth-century women writers' involvement in the Risorgimento, the Italian unification movement. Her MA thesis was about Cornelia Turner, who wrote two pro-Risorgimento novels, but is mostly remembered for her relationships with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Giovanni Ruffini. In her thesis, Jessica constructed the comprehensive biography of Turner, examined the author's literary and political influence on her contemporaries, and highlighted Turner's role in the Italian nationalist movement. 

Jessica hopes to one day return to Italy—or "the Mother Country," as Christina Rossetti called it—and spend the rest of her days drinking earl grey and writing whimsically about the human condition.