Francesco Cotticelli obtained his PhD in History of Modern and Contemporary Theatre in 1998 and held a post-doc appointment at Ohio State University. In 2004, he was a visiting professor at the Institut für Film-, Medien- und Theaterwissenschaft at the University of Vienna, Austria, and is currently Professor of Theatre Studies at the Faculty of Humanities of the Second University in Naples.He has extensively studied the theatrical life in Europe between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, with special reference to Naples and Southern Italy, carrying out thorough research into archival funds, which provided insight into the outstanding milieu of the Southern capital and its connections with other European places. At Beinecke he is investigating the theatre materials preserved in some special collections, which shed light into the mechanisms of production and consumption of performances in the early modern age, if compared with many well-known sources from other contexts.