Grandgent Award Winners
In 1961, the Dante Society of America established an annual award for the essay on a subject related to the life or works of Dante Alighieri by a graduate student enrolled in an American college or university. The award is named for Charles Hall Grandgent, professor of Italian and Romance linguistics at Harvard University who served as president of the Dante Society from 1915-1932. For further information and submission guidelines, please consult our Prizes page.
2023 Charles Firestone East (Columbia University) “Se la prima materia delli elementi era da Dio intesa: Metaphysical and Natural Views of Prime Matter in Aristotle and Dante”
2022 Giulia Maria Gliozzi Wilkins (University of Notre Dame) “Osservazioni sulla misura in Dante: La directio voluntatis come sinonimo di rettitudine (solo) in quanto insieme di scelte moderate dalla misura”
2021 Caterina Nicodemo (University of Chicago) “Sull'episodio gerioneo: osservazioni e nuove proposte”
2020 Natale Vacalebre (University of Pennsylvania), “Paradiso (e Purgatorio) riconquistati. Un incunabolo dantesco in America e il riscoperto autore delle sue chiose.”
2019 Mariagrazia De Luca (University of California, Berkeley), “From Forced Readers to Freedom Writers: Responding to Dante in Postcolonial Somalia”
2018 (shared) Alyssa Granacki (Duke University), “‘Molti e molte’: Gendering knowledge in Dante’s Convivio”
2018 (shared) Alice Martignoni (University of Toronto), “‘Quatuordeci valentissimi homini romani’. Confronto tra il commento dantesco del Falso Boccaccio (ms. BNCF II I 47, cc. 184r-189v.) e De civitate Dei V, 18”
2017 Andrés Amitai Wilson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), “‘For the Love of God’: The Centrality of Bernard of Clairvaux’s Song of Songs Commentaries in Dante’s Divine Comedy”
2016 Thomas Graff (University of Notre Dame), “A Rhetoric of Suspension: Rethinking Salvation in the Commedia”
2015 Nicole Madeleine Adair Jones (University of California, Berkeley), “Knowledge, Commentary, Pane orzato: Dante’s Defensive Praise of the volgare in Convivio”
2014 [not awarded]
2013 Joshua Reid (University of Kentucky), “Softening the Brows of Dread Renown: Rossetti’s Revision of Dantean Portraiture”
2012 Leah Schwebel (University of Connecticut), “‘Simile Lordura,’ Altra Bolgia: Authorial Conflation in Inferno XXVI”
2012 (honorable mention) Katie Guida (Pennsylvania State Unversity), “Fellini and Dante: Life and Death in La dolce vita”
2011 Julie Van Peteghem (Columbia University), “The Vernacular Roots of Dante’s Reading of Ovid in the Commedia: Two Examples from Purgatorio”
2010 Christiana Purdy Moudarres (Yale University), “Devouring Selves in the Circle of Gluttony: A Gloss on the contrapasso of Inferno VI”
2009 (shared) Maria Clara Iglesias (Yale University), “The Rain of Hope: Theology and Exile in Paradiso XXV”
2009 (shared) Zakhar Ishof (Yale University), “Introduction to Poetry in the Form of Poetry: Dante Read by Mandelstam”
2008 Stanley Levers (Yale University), “The Ethics of Solomonic Verse in Dante’s Paradiso”
2007 Kristen Allen (University of Toronto), “‘The Foot Fails’: Isidore’s Etymology of Despair and the Opening Canto of the Divine Comedy”
2007 (honorable mention) Davide Bolognesi (Columbia University ), “Di alcune ramificazioni dell’Arbor vitae di Ubertino da Casale nella Commedia”
2006 Kathleen Chen (University of Minnesota), “I Heard Cries of ‘Mary, Pray for Us’: The Role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dante’s Purgatorio”
2005 Zane Mackin (Columbia University), “Saint Peter Damian: Dante’s contemplativus militans”
2004 Robert Di Pede (Seton Hall University), “The Sensual Pilgrim, Transfiguration and the World: The Poetics of Society in the Dantean Vision of Love”
2003 Heather Webb (Stanford University), “‘Per core un marmo’: Dante’s Stone Cold Rhymes”
2002 Patrick Gardner (University of Notre Dame), “A People with Whom I Must Not Be: Dante’s Relation to the Sodomites”
2001 Martin Eisner (Columbia University), “Meaning’s Order: Putting a ‘ciascun’alma’in its Place”
2000 Paul Carranza (University of Pennsylvania), “Philosophical Songs: The ‘Song of Iopas’ in the Aeneid and its Presence in the Divine Comedy”
1999 [not awarded]
1998 [not awarded]
1997 Joseph Luzzi (Yale University), “Dante’s Use and Abuse of Poetry”
1996 George Trone (Yale University), “The Cry of Dereliction in Purgatorio XXIII”
1995 Courtney Cahill (Princeton University), “The Limitations of Difference in Paradiso XIII’s Two Arts: Philosophy and Poetry”
1994 Claudia Rattazzi Papka (Columbia University), “‘Tra feltro e feltro’: Dante’s Metatextual Apocalypse”
1993 (shared) Lawrence Warner (University of Pennsylvania), “The Dark Wood and the Dark Word in Dante’s Commedia”
1993 (shared) Tobias Foster Gittes (Columbia University), “The Veglio di Creta: Headstone for a Hubristic Humanity”
1992 [not awarded]
1991 Mary Refling (New York University), “The Hendecasyllable in the Divine Comedy”
1990 Stan Benfell (New York University), “Nimrod, the Ascent to Heaven, and Dante’s ‘ovra inconsummabile’”
1989 Bradley Dick (New York University), “Guido da Montefeltro and the Doctrine of Repentance”
1988 Jayne Blankenship (Columbia University), “Biblical Tradition and the Third Dream of Dante’s Purgatorio”
1987 [not awarded]
1986 [not awarded]
1985 [not awarded]
1984 [not awarded]
1983 [not awarded]
1982 [not awarded]
1981 Giulio Silano (University of Toronto), “The Ecclesiology of Dante’s Works”
1980 [not awarded]
1979 [not awarded]
1978 [not awarded]
1977 [not awarded]
1976 [not awarded]
1975 Roberto Giacone (Harvard University), “Ugo Capeto e Dante”
1974 Donald Gilman (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), “Classical Convention and Dante’s Concept of Poetic Inspiration”
1973 Laura Hager (University of California, Berkeley), “Dante’s Stylistic Pilgrimage”
1972 Rev. Louis M. La Favia (Harvard University), “Per una reinterpretazione dell’episodio di Manfredi nel Canto III del Purgatorio”
1971 Corinne Black (University of California, San Diego), “Names and Naming as Poetic Strategy in Dante’s Vita nuova”
1970 Miriam Rappaport (Columbia University), “Dante and the Antichrist”
1970 (honorable mention) Margherita S. Frankel (New York University), “Le immagini di Dio nel Paradiso”
1969 Kenneth A. Bleeth (Harvard University), “Narrator and Landscape in the Commedia: An Approach to Dante’s Earthly Paradise”
1968 Franco Masciandaro (Harvard University), “Appunti sul tempo e eternità nella Commedia”
1967 [not awarded]
1966 [not awarded]
1965 Dabney Glen Park, Jr. (Tulane University), “Dante and the Idea of Poverty”
1964 Terence P. Logan (Harvard University), “The Characterization of Ulysses in Homer, Virgil and Dante: A Study in Sources and Analogues”
1963 Edward M. Hood (Harvard University), “The Condition of Ulysses: Expansions and Contractions in Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno”
1962 James Applewhite (Tulane University), “Dante’s Use of the Extended Simile in the Inferno”
1961 William J. De Sua (University of Michigan), “The Renovators: Dante’s 18th-century English Translators”