The Dante Society of America regularly organizes panel sessions at various academic conferences, and holds its own annual meeting and conference.
The Dante Society of America will hold its 141st Annual Meeting and a symposium titled "Cosmic Visions" at Johns Hopkins University on Saturday, April 29, 2023. The symposium is being organized by Virginia Jewiss and Arielle Saiber with support from JHU's Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. Please check back here in the fall for further details.
The Call for Papers for the 58th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan (May 11–May 13, 2023) is now open. Coming off the centenary year of 2021, we are interested in a wide of approaches such as those that seek to historicize Dante, those that consider his work in dialogue with global medieval culture, and those that consider the long history of his multicultural reception.
Please submit a proposal through the ICMS site here by September 15. For any questions, please be in touch with Akash Kumar at akashkumar@berkeley.edu
The Dante Society of America will sponsor three panel sessions at the 2023 Annual Convention of the Renaissance Society of America, which will be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 9–11 March 2023. Descriptions of each panel follow below.
The now extended deadline for the call for papers is 31 July 2022. Please send your proposals to Filippo Gianferrari, fgianfer@ucsc.edu. Submissions must include: paper title (15-word maximum); abstract (150-word maximum); curriculum vitae; Ph.D. or other terminal degree completion date (past or expected). Panels are open to scholars and researchers from various disciplines and at different career stages (as per RSA policy, graduate students who are currently working on completing their final degree program will be considered as well, if their materials are directly related to their advanced degree, i.e., not term papers).
Please note that per RSA and DSA policies, presenters must be current members of both RSA and DSA prior to presenting, and must also be registered for the RSA Annual Convention. The DSA does not cover membership, registration, or travel/lodging fees.
Panel 1: Dante’s Echoing Woods in Renaissance Pastoral
During the last year of his life, while working on the final cantos of the Paradiso, Dante penned two Latin eclogues in reply to Giovanni del Virgilio, a professor of classics in Bologna. With his first eclogue, Dante set off a bucolic exchange that played a key role in resuscitating the genre and restoring it to its Virgilian archetype. Inspired by that exchange, del Virgilio would go on to address an eclogue to Albertino Mussato. In this poem, del Virgilio identifies Dante as the one who resuscitated the genre after centuries of silence. In many ways, this was no exaggeration, as neither the ancient imitators of Virgil—Calpurnius and Nemesianus—nor Virgil’s Carolingian imitators circulated in late medieval Italy before the time of Petrarch. More importantly, Dante refashioned this particular poetic medium into a manifesto for the dignity of vernacular poetry that was closely modeled on the classics. Dante’s unusual choice and original reinterpretation of the bucolic genre initiated a pastoral movement in which Petrarch and Boccaccio became involved, continuing to push the boundaries of the genre. This panel proposes to explore the complex legacy of Dante’s pastoral reawakening in the Renaissance.
We invite papers and ongoing research projects on related topics, as well as disciplinary and methodological perspectives, including but not limited to:
Panel 2: “le donne antiche e’ cavalieri” (Purgatorio 14.109-110), Dante and the Renaissance Epic Romance
Dante anticipates the exceptional nature of his personal ‘epic’ at Inferno 2.4–5, where he describes himself following Virgil and preparing for “la guerra / sì del cammino e sì de la pietate” (to face the struggle [literally, the war]— / of the way and of the pity; emphasis added). The author’s words may also allude to a generic oxymoron, as they define the Commedia as a poem in which epic (guerra) and elegy (pietà) are bound together by the hero’s personal and spiritual formation (cammino). A few lines after that, he compares himself to Aeneas (32), thus pointing to a model of epic where instead elegy represents a narrative impasse in the fulfillment of the heroic destiny–as exemplified by Dido’s tragedy in Aeneid IV. An obvious precedent of Dante’s reconceptualization of epic and elegy was the medieval romance tradition, particularly the “matter of Britain,” which was extremely popular in medieval Italy and is perhaps evoked in the scene of the “dark wood” where the hero finds himself lost at the beginning of the Commedia. As it is well known, Dante’s unprecedented conflation of the medieval romance tradition with that of the ancient, Latin epic would prove a powerful influence on the development of the Renaissance epic romance. This panel provides space to explore new directions in the study of the Renaissance epic romance in light of Dante’s innovative codification of the genre.
We invite papers and ongoing research projects on related topics, as well as disciplinary and methodological perspectives, including but not limited to:
Panel 3: The Renaissance of Dante’s Vita nuova
Recent studies on the afterlife of the Vita nuova have helped assess the lasting, far-reaching, and multifarious influence that Dante’s booklet played on world literature and culture. In the milieu of late thirteenth-century Italy, when the vernacular culture still relied overwhelmingly on oral communication, Dante’s Vita nuova represented an unprecedented type of vernacular book that played a key influence on a steadily expanding lay readership. After Dante, one may argue, vernacular books took on a new life. The text itself alludes to its own groundbreaking nature and materiality. Shaping the body of the text, however, is not the only challenge thematized by the Vita nuova, as issues such as textual transmission, interpretation, and cultural authorization are central to this poetic experiment. Dante’s quest for an innovative literary object that may better represent the emerging vernacular culture overlaps with his struggle to account for Beatrice’s miraculous nature. The outcome is the ultimate “translatable” text: its multiform reception and multiplicity of readaptations continue to reveal new potential meanings inherent in the original. In this continuing life, however, the original works also changes. Hence, this panel proposes not only to explore the Renaissance afterlife of Dante’s Vita nuova but also its continuous renewal, as well as its influence on, and transformation into new forms of textuality and cultural innovation.
We invite papers and ongoing research projects on related topics, as well as disciplinary and methodological perspectives, including but not limited to:
The Dante Society of America is organizing three sessions for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. The next meeting of the MLA will be held in San Francisco, CA from January 5-8, 2023. The deadline for the call for papers was March 25, 2022. Once the sessions have been approved, details will be posted here.
Dante's Economies: Industry, Work and Money Inspired by the 2023 MLA Presidential Theme, “Working Conditions”, this session invites presentations that explore issues relating to Dante's treatment of industry, work, toil, labor, or other 'natural' forms of generation (defined in contrast with usury or what Dante considered perverted or unnatural forms of generation).
Confession and Penance in Dante This session invites presentations that explore issues relating to confession and penance across Dante’s works and in the medieval Italian context.
Ecocritical Approaches to Dante This session invites presentations that approach Dante’s works from ecocritical perspectives. We welcome submissions that interrogate the boundaries between the natural, non-natural, unnatural, supernatural, or that investigate particular issues such as: nature as a theoretical concern, natural imagery, meteorology, etc.
A listing of meetings and events sponsored by the Dante Society in previous years is available here.
Minutes and agenda for the Society's annual membership meetings since 2014 may be found under "About the Society."