Meetings and Events

The Dante Society of America regularly organizes panel sessions at various academic conferences, and holds its own annual meeting and conference.

Upcoming Events

Due to the coronavirus public health emergency, the Dante Society events that had been planned for spring 2020 were postponed. Please see below for further details.

  • POSTPONED: The Dante Society of America had organized four sessions at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, which was to have been held in Philadelphia from April 2-4, 2020. The 2020 annual meeting was canceled, but organizers will attempt to offer the same sessions at the 2021 annual meeting in Dublin, Ireland (see below for details). 
  • POSTPONED: The Dante Society of America had organized three sessions at the 55th International Congress on Medieval Studies, which was to have been at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI, from May 7-10, 2020. The 2020 Congress was canceled, but organizers will attempt to offer the same sessions at the 2021 Congress (see below for details).

Renaissance Society of America

CANCELED/POSTPONED: The Dante Society of America had organized four sessions at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, which was to have been held in Philadelphia from April 2-4, 2020. The 2020 annual meeting has been canceled, but organizers will attempt to offer the same sessions at the 2021 annual meeting in Dublin, Ireland. 

Dante & Measurement (session # 2326)

Chair: Arielle Saiber (Bowdoin)

1. Emanuele Lugli, PhD (Asst. Prof. of Art History, Stanford), Amor Oltre Misura: Love and the Politics of Measurement Standards in the Age of Dante”

2. Corey Flack, PhD (Independent Scholar), “Measure and the Trinity in Dante's Heaven of the Sun”

3. Paola Ureni, PhD (Assoc. Prof of Italian, CUNY Staten Island), “Measurement between Medicine and Ethics in Dante’s Writing”

4. Pasquale Terracciano, PhD (Director of Centro sull’Umanesimo Contemporaneo at INSR Firenze), “Fabrica Inferni. Mapping Dante in the Renaissance”

Echoes of Dante in Boccaccio (session #2328)

Chair: Gur Zak (Hebrew U of Jerusalem)

1. Maggie Fritz-Morkin, PhD (Asst. Prof. of Italian, UNC Chapel Hill), “The Elegies of Fiammetta and Francesca: Inferno V and Boccaccio’s politics of adultery”

2. David Lummus, PhD (Asst. Director, The Center for Italian Studies and Devers Family Program in Dante Studies, Notre Dame), “Boccaccio’s Francesca: Rewriting Dante on Mad Love in Decameron IX, 1”

3. James Kriesel, PhD (Asst. Prof. of Italian, Villanova), “Dante, Boccaccio, and the Body”

Dante’s Legacy in the Visual Arts (session #2330)

Chair: Susan Gaylard (U Washington)

1. C. Jean Campbell, PhD (Prof. of Art History, Emory), “Dante and the Physical Arts: World-building outside and within the Commedia”

2. Karl Whittington, PhD (Associate Professor of History of Art, Ohio State Univ.), “Diagrammatic Formats from Page to Wall: Dante and the Strozzi Chapel, Revisited”

3. Christine Zappella, PhD Candidate in Art History (Univ. of Chicago), “The Intellectual Culture of Florence’s Confraternity of John the Baptist: Andrea del Sarto’s Dante Portrait” 

Dante’s Legacy in Renaissance Italian Literature (session # 2331)

Chair: Tim Kircher (Guilford College)

1. Susan Gaylard, PhD (Assoc. Prof. of Italian, Univ.of Washington), “Machiavelli’s Dante: Medicating the belly in Mandragola”

2. Marco Faini, PhD (Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Universities of Venice and Toronto), “Biblical epic, spiritual rewritings and Dante’s Legacy: Giuseppe Fedeli’s Il fonte del Messia (1531)”

3. Akash Kumar, PhD (Visiting Asst. Prof. of Italian, IU Bloomington), “The Science of Poetry: Dante as Read by Varchi, Giambullari, and Galileo”

International Congress on Medieval Studies

CANCELED/POSTPONED: The Dante Society of America had organized three sessions at the 55th International Congress on Medieval Studies, which was to have been at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI, from May 7-10, 2020. The 2020 Congress has been canceled, but organizers will attempt to offer the same sessions at the 2021 Congress.

Dante 1: Bodies, Senses, Spaces

Ben David (Lewis and Clark College), “The Wisdom of Dante’s Body in Inferno 21-23”

Elisabeth Trischler (University of Leeds), “The ‘Chiostro’ Paradox of Dante’s Commedia:  Creating Meaning through Contemplative Modes”

Paolo Scartoni (Rutgers University), “’Mi dirizzò con le parole sue’: From Counsel to Action in Paradiso”

Dante 2: Poetry, Philosophy, and Fabricated Meaning

Humberto Ballesteros (Hostos Community College), “How to Reach the Point Enclosed by that which it Encloses:  A Proposal for Reading Paradiso 28”

Matteo Pace (Connecticut College), “Pneuma, ventus, bufera: On Violent Compulsion and Dante’s Circle of Lust”

Alani Hicks-Bartlett (Brown University), “e vei jausen lo joi qu’esper denan”: Dante’s Fabrication of Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio XXVI and De vulgari eloquentia”

Dante 3: Historical Contexts, Hybrid Forms

Marco Sartore (Columbia University), “Contrition and Absolution: Dante between Theologians and Popular Religious Culture in the Episodes of Guido da Montefeltro, Manfredi, and Buonconte”

Nassime Chida (Columbia University), “Historicizing Inferno 27: Guido da Montefeltro and the Warlords of Romagna”

Mattia Boccuti (University of Notre Dame), “Mary and Beatrice: A Study of Three Episodes of the Vita Nova”

Recorded Events

Past Meetings and Events

A listing of meetings and events sponsored by the Dante Society in previous years is available here.