Gregory Dowling is an author, translator, literary critic and Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the Università Ca’ Foscari[1] in Venice.
While living in Verona, he visited Venice very often until he decided to move there, and began teaching English at the Oxford School-based there.
Specifically, his book-length publications include David Mason: A Critical Introduction (a monography on the author of the verse-novel Ludlow); In Venice and in the Veneto with Lord Byron (a guidebook which traces Byron's three-year experience in Venice); Someone’s Road Home: Questions of Home and Exile in American Narrative Poetry, which focuses on the works of H.W.
Longfellow, Herman Melville, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Anthony Hecht and Vikram Seth; and A Study of the English Verb.
He then took a break from writing fiction to focus on his academic career, and returned in 2015 with the novel Ascension, a historical thriller set in 18th-century Venice, the first in the Alvise Marangon Mysteries series, centred on the protagonist Alvise Marangon, a half-Venetian, half-English tour guide who turns spy to help the Venetian intelligence services thwart imminent threats to the city; Ascension was named “Historical Novel of the Month" in The Times,[2] which described it as blending “a laconic, amused style informed by American detective literature with a profound knowledge of Venetian geography and history.