Javier Patiño, Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA, will be a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fellow at I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, in Florence, Italy, for the 2024-2025 academic year. Professor Patiño will be working on a book titled Ecologies of Decay: Spontaneous Generation and Nature’s Economy, in which he argues that spontaneous generation (the belief that a variety of creatures, including insects, toads, and fungi, emerged from decaying matter) decisively informed 17th-century views of nature’s “economy,” its program to remain always similar to itself yet never the same. Professor Patiño’s first book, The Age of Subtlety: Nature and Rhetorical Conceits in Early Modern Europe, is scheduled to be published in June 2024 by the University of Delaware Press. For further information, see the following link: https://itatti.harvard.edu/people/javier-pati%C3%B1o-loira