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

Modern Language Association Annual Convention, 6-9 January 2022

As an allied organization of the Modern Language Association, the Dante Society of America has organized three panel sessions for the 2022 MLA Annual Convention, which will take place in Washington, DC, and online, from 6-9 January 2022. NOTE: On December 27, the DSA announced that all three of its sessions would be held online only; those who wish to attend virtually must still register for the convention and pay the applicable registration rate.

235V - Translations and Adaptations of Dante’s Comedy
Friday, 7 January 2022, 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM
Anne Leone (Syracuse University), presider

  • Jacob Blakesley (University of Leeds), "Toward a History of Worldwide Translations of the Commedia"
  • Demetrio S. Yocum (U of Notre Dame), “A Soul’s Journey: From Dante’s Commedia to Luigi Santucci’s Éschaton”
  • Humberto Ballesteros (Hostos Community College, City University of New York), “An Infierno Twenty-Two Years in the Making: A Brief History of a Lengthy Scholarly Journey”
  • Giulio Genovese (University of Pennsylvania), “After the Attack: A Reassessment of Carmelo Bene’s 1981 Lectura Dantis”

543 - Multilingual and Multimedia Dante
Saturday, 8 January 2022, 3:30 PM - 4:45 PM
Kristina Marie Olson (George Mason University), presider

  • Julie E. Singer (Washington U in St. Louis), “Medieval ‘Motherese’; or, The Nursery as Multilingual Space”
  • Mads Larsen (University of California, Los Angeles), “Mediating Presence in Dante’s Inferno from Silent Cinema to Virtual Reality”
  • Madison U. Sowell (Brigham Young University), “On Making Good Use of Postmodern Versions of Dante’s Epic”
  • Elizabeth Coggeshall (Florida State University), “The Hell Franchise: Dante’s Commedia in American Marketing”

648 - Animal Dante
Sunday, 9 January 2022, 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM
Anne Leone (Syracuse University), presider

  • Alejandro Cuadrado (Columbia University), “‘Due bestie van sott’ una pelle’: Horses and Humans in Paradiso 21”
  • Patricia Vazquez (College of Southern Nevada), “The Spotted Pelt of Fraud: A Dissection of Dante’s Lonza”
  • Leonardo Canova (University of Pisa), “‘Quale allodetta che ’n aere si spazia’: Transmutations of the Eagle in the Heaven of Jupiter”
  • Maria Teresa De Luca (Rutgers University), “Cranes and the Divine Skywriting in the Heaven of Jupiter”

New College Conference on Medieval & Renaissance Studies, 3-5 March 2022

The 2022 Dante Society of America Symposium will take place in Sarasota, Florida, on March 3-5, 2022, as part of the New College Conference on Medieval & Renaissance Studies. The DSA will sponsor two panels and a keynote lecture, all of which will be held on Saturday, March 5.

We expect that all sessions will take place in person and on site. We are, of course, monitoring the global health crisis as it continues to unfold, and will plan for contingencies as needed. But the members of the organizing committee are hopeful that we will be able to welcome you safely to Florida in the spring.

Registration for the 2022 Conference will open in December 2021. Registration costs for most recent conference, held in 2020, were:

  • Full-time faculty: $125 before March 1; $175 after March 1
  • Part-time, contingent, and retired faculty, and independent scholars: $75 before March 1; $125 after March 1
  • Graduate students: $50 before March 1;  $100 after March 1
  • Local residents (non-academics)

The theme of the 2022 DSA Symposium is “A lo stremo del mondo: Dante and the World.” The keynote speaker will be Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison. Former professor and MLA program director Dennis Looney will offer a response, which will be followed by audience Q&A.

Dante and the Global Middle Ages

This session seeks papers that read Dante’s works alongside and against contemporary texts in a trans-regional cultural landscape. The panel aims to continue the work of de-centering Dante’s Europe—removing his Italy from a Western Christian bloc and relocating it within a dynamic Mediterranean basin, where patterns of migration, commerce, pilgrimage, war, and enslavement brought about encounters and collisions of diverse mentalities from across the globe. Papers will address the following questions: How did intercultural exchange shape (or not) the Commedia’s understanding of “world”? What do we gain or lose from reading Dante’s works in light of the connectivity and mobility of the medieval world? What tensions emerge when we situate Dante’s works within local, regional, or globalized systems?

Dante as World Author?

Dante’s name frequently tops lists of the canon of “world authors,” those authors whose works have purportedly reached a “global” recognition (frequently understood to mean recognition within hegemonic Western categories of literary production and circulation). On the one hand, this is doubtlessly true, as testified by the worldwide celebrations of Dante and his works in the seventh centenary of his death. On the other hand, underpinning consideration of Dante as “world author” are assumptions about the “universality” of the ethical, social, theological, and cultural values his work promotes, as well as the reach of his works to audiences that are located, according to Western frameworks, “a lo stremo del mondo” (Paradiso 19.41).

This roundtable will discuss the value of considering Dante a “world author,” particularly in light of the commemorations of the poet and his works in the past year. In their contributions, roundtable participants might consider the following questions: With what measures can we assess Dante’s qualification as a “world author”? What are the limits to this status or qualification? What is the value of reading Dante’s works as situated within specific local Italian contexts, or as part of a transhistorical and transcultural continuum of Weltliteratur? How do politics and ethics shape such a reading, and how are these fields in turn impacted by reading Dante’s works in terms of his supposed world-author status? How might proponents of the global circulation, translation, and appropriation of Dante’s person, title, and texts answer charges of “presentism,” “Eurocentrism,” “colonialism,” “imperialism,” and other impositions of dominant cultural hierarchies and values? The aim is to provide a lively discussion, with short “lightning-talk” style presentations from contributors, followed by a longer moderated Q&A session.

Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, 30 March - 2 April 2022

As an associated organization of the Renaissance Society of America, the Dante Society of America has organized four panel sessions for the 2022 RSA Annual Meeting, which will take place in Dublin, Ireland, from 30 March - 2 April 2022.

Dottrina: Poetics of Vernacular Learning In and After Dante I
Saturday, April 2, 2022, 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM (IST)
Arielle Saiber (Bowdoin College), chair

  • Helena Phillips-Robins (University of Cambridge), “Dante and vernacular preaching: Living out the Credo in Paradiso 24”
  • William Franke (Vanderbilt University), “Revolution in Poetic Language: Dante’s Use of the Vernacular as Vehicle for Theological Revelation”
  • Luca Lombardo, Università di Venezia Ca' Foscari, “Dante’s rhetorical-grammatical and philosophical education: formative function of the notary in the Florentine vernacular culture”

Dottrina: Poetics of Vernacular Learning In and After Dante II
Saturday, April 2, 2022, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM (IST)
Catherine Keen (University College London), chair
Julianna Visco (Princeton University), panel respondent

  • Arielle Saiber (Bowdoin College), “The Thing Is... The Explosion of Thinginess in Renaissance Fables”
  • Francesco Feriozzi (University of Oxford), “Dante in Pietro Bembo’s and Giammaria Barbieri’s Occitan Studies
  • Filippo Gianferrari (University of California, Santa Cruz), “Pastoral Syncretism: The Ecloga Theoduli Between Dante’s Purgatorio and Boccaccio’s Olympia

Dante and the Sciences of the Human: Medicine, Physics, Soul
Saturday, April 2, 2022, 2:30 PM - 4:00 PM (IST)
Matteo Pace (Connecticut College), chair

  • Catherine Bloomer (Columbia University), “Disabled Body and Female Soul: From Dante to Marinella”
  • Andrea Moudarres (University of California, Los Angeles), “Chiron’s Body: Centaur Representations between Inferno 12 and Medici Florence”
  • Joseph Romano, Columbia University), “Sedes amoris: The Problem of the Passions between Dante and Petrarch, and Aristotle and Augustine”

Dante’s Thought in Context: Theology and Philosophy in Late-Medieval Italy
Saturday, April 2, 2022, 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM (IST)
William Franke (Vanderbilt University), chair

  • Lorenzo Dell'Oso (Trinity College, Dublin), “Cosmology, Theology, and Philosophy in Florence’s ‘Schools of the Religious’: Some Research Hypothesis)”
  • Nicolò Maldina (Università di Bologna), “Dante's in the Context of Late-Medieval Preaching”
  • Andrea Aldo Robiglio (University of Leuven), “Dante as Romance Philosopher”

International Congress on Medieval Studies, 9-14 May 2022

The DSA will sponsor two sessions on Dante at the 57th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, May 9-14, 2022, and one themed session, organized by Matteo Pace, on “Dante and the Sciences of the Human.” Online registration will open in March.

Dante 1: Signs and Systems, Appropriation and Apprehension
Presider: Akash Kumar (IU Bloomington)

  • Elizabeth Coggeshall (Florida State University), “‘I liked Dante’s Inferno when it was still a poem’: Dante Memes
  • Maria Teresa De Luca (Rutgers University), “Fervore and Lexical Semantics in Dante’s Convivio”
  • Pierangelo Blandino (University of Lapland), “The Influence of Dante’s Thinking over the Notions of Sovereignty, Imperialism, and its Potential in the Realm of the Fourth Industrial Revolution”
  • Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė (Cambridge University), “Dante’s “Other” Women and the Socially Extended Mind in the Vita Nova”

Dante 2: History, Theology, Conflict
Presider: Elizabeth Coggeshall (FSU)

  • Jilian Pizzi (Columbia University), “Historicizing the Deicide Charge in Paradiso VII: 46-8”
  • Max Matukhin (Princeton University), “Dante’s Sacramental Poetics: Confession in the Commedia”
  • Christiana Purdy Moudarres (Yale University), “Dante’s Hope for Heresy’s Redemption”

Dante 3: Dante and the Sciences of the Human: Medicine, Physics, Soul
Presider: Matteo Pace (Connecticut College)

  • Joseph Abraham Levi (George Washington University), “Inferno Canto XXVIII: 30-31. The Prophet Muhammad and the Caliph ‘Ali: (Mis)Representing the Body, Discovering the Soul”
  • Edward Allnutt (University College London), “Body and Soul in Systematic Approaches to the Design of the Comedy”

Recorded Events

Past Meetings and Events

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."