Tristan Kay specializes in medieval Italian culture, with a particular focus on Dante and early lyric poetry. He graduated from the University of Leeds with a B.A. in Italian and Spanish in 2005 and remained at Leeds to complete an M.A. by Research on Dante and the troubadours in 2006. In 2010 he received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, writing a thesis on the relationship between eros, spirituality, and vernacular language in Dante. The thesis received the Society of Italian Studies Postgraduate Prize and Oxford's Senior Paget Toynbee Prize. From 2010 to 2012, he held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Dartmouth College and since 2012 he has been Lecturer in Italian at the University of Bristol. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Italian Studies.

"I would warmly recommend Dante's Lyric Redemption also to undergraduates who wish to enrich and complicate their view of the Middle Ages beyond that of a time of absolutes, transcendence, and self-denial." -- Nicolo Crisafi, ICI Berlin, Modern Language Review

"Specialists will find readings here to interest them, but the broader project joins a tradition of studies on Dante that have celebrated finding the unique, romanticized poetic "I" whose existence was a premise of their inquiry." --Laurence E. Hooper, Renaissance Quarterly

"...approaches in a new and original way the question of Dante's return to Beatrice in his magnum opus...poses important questions as it redefines the debate about the relationship between eros and spirituality in Dante's oeuvre, and especially in the Commedia...Kay does not accept the binary interpretation that draws a rigid line between earthly love (which, of course, is different from lust) and theology--and, hence, between Dante's so-called minor works and the Commedia...a testament to Dante's endless experimentalism through fusion of multiple seemingly mutually exclusive traditions through a careful manipulation of his sources and through novel approaches and re-interpretations of his own early works, now seen in a new key of Christian values." --Jelena Todorovic, The Medieval Review