Essays
Professor Wears Prada is a collection of essays that lives on Substack. It's where I write to procrastinate writing. (At least I'm honest.)
I'm deep into a book project about women, Italy, and leadership. An agent recently told me, "Women. Italy. Your audience is so narrow." I completely disagree.
We shall see.
After years of researching, publishing, and teaching about teams and leadership, I'm finally giving in to my desire to write about Italy. I write as a scholar who has spent years learning from the place itself.
These essays began as weekly emails to participants who had signed on to andiamo with me to explore leadership in Italy. Somewhere along the way, I realized I looked forward to writing those emails as much as teaching the programs. So I decided to keep going.
Today, I teach these ideas in Florence through Northwestern programs—some designed for Kellogg executives, others for graduate students and alumni in the School of Communication, and perhaps the bravest souls of all, the remarkable undergraduates from every corner of the university who choose to spend their summers in Italy with me.
Why Write?
"I write because, exacting as it may be to do so, it is still more difficult to refrain, and because, however conscious of one's limitations one may be, there is always at the back of one's mind an irrational hope that this next book will be different: it will be the rounded achievement, the complete fulfilment. It never has been: yet I am still writing." — Iris Origo, Images and Shadows
"I think," said my step-father, Percy Lubbock, when I once commented on the exquisitely neat and decorative pages of his manuscript, "I think, before I write." I do not, alas, resemble him." — Iris Origo, Images and Shadows
"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." — Joan Didion, Why I Write
This picture was taken in the personal library of Iris Origo, at her La Foce estate in the Val d'Orcia.
The book I'm holding is titled The Most Illustrious Women of the Italian Renaissance. To find this book on Iris's shelves fuels my determination to write about these illustrious women, of whom I consider her to be one.
Designer of a vast estate with a social cause, humanitarian during the war, woman who left a roadmap to finding meaning in life and doing so with character and grace. She is without question my favorite Renaissance Woman.
I wonder if she had a vague sense when she last held this book, that I’d be here a half century later, in her library hanging on her every word.
