Center for Italian Studies
The Center for Italian Studies was created in 1978 by the University of Pennsylvania President Martin Meyerson and by the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Vartan Gregorian, with the endorsement of the Republic of Italy. It was the first such center in the United States.
The Center supports the University of Pennsylvania's faculty and students in developing their research and pedagogy concerning Italian history, language, culture, economy, and society; it also promotes the circulation in Philadelphia, the United States and abroad, of the research on Italian topics developed at Penn; finally, the Center facilitates the communications between the University of Pennsylvania and: the Italian community in Philadelphia, the institutions representing the Italian Republic in the United States, and the centers and cultural organizations that promote Italian-related issues in the US.
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Publication Foul Tales, Public Knowledge: Bringing Dante's 'Divine Comedy' to Wikipedia(2022-12-13) Ingallinella, LauraThis contribution discusses WikiDante, a set of best practices for the implementation of content related to the Divine Comedy on Wikipedia, chiefly designed for (yet not limited to) the undergraduate classroom. Developed as a digital project involving undergraduate students in partnership with Wiki Education, WikiDante consisted of two iterations, the first of which created or revised entries on the women from Dante’s recent history mentioned in the poem. For two decades, scholars have treated Wikipedia as the proverbial elephant in the room—shunned, ignored, or shamefully used only in lack of more anointed tools. This essay explores the benefits of using Wikipedia for digital scholarly activism in Dante Studies, outlining the challenges and educational outcomes of organizing editing campaigns on Wikipedia focusing on Dante and his work. After discussing the project’s components, the essay indicates future venues for the applicability of this framework by scholars and educators interested in digital public scholarship and knowledge equity.Publication The Global Popularity of Dante's 'Divina Commedia': Translations, Libraries, Wikipedia(2022-12-13) Blakesley, JacobStudies of the translation and reception history of Dante’s Divina Commedia have rarely included the use of either distant reading (aka large-scale literary analysis) or Digital Humanities, much less both. However, using both these methods allows innovative research questions to be pursued and answered with regard to Dante’s fortuna, as I have shown in four previous articles regarding Dante and other writers. This contribution draws on three new datasets that I constructed myself in order to study canons of world literature, using Dante’s Divine Comedy as a case study: a comprehensive catalogue of all the worldwide complete translations of the Commedia (or single canticles such as Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso), published from the 16th century until 2021; readership data pertaining to all the Wikipedia entries dedicated to Dante’s biographical entry and his works; and Commedia holdings, in both Italian and translation, in all national libraries with online searchable catalogues. The aim is to see where Dante’s text is translated and circulates the most, and whether his work is globally popular.Publication Introduction Missiles for the Future: Dante and DH(2022-12-13) Coggeshall, Elizabeth; Kumar, AkashPublication The Poetics of 'Gentilezza' in the 'Fiore' and the Emergence of Dante's Political Vision Before the Exile(2022-12-13) Clines, Robert JThis essay investigates the political and literary culture of late Duecento Florence as well as the entangled rather than mutually exclusive nature of Dante’s pre- and post-exile political and literary visions. I read Dante’s political vision against the Fiore, a Tuscan form of the medieval French epic Roman de la Rose that appeared in Italy before 1290. Pervasive in Dante’s politics, poetics, and the cultural milieux in which the Fiore appeared are the rejection of French/Provençal cultural dominance, Franco-Angevin political influence in Italy, and mendicants as morally bankrupt threats to civil society. In turn, this essay argues that the Fiore and Dante’s participation in the literary culture that produced it were the consequence of the geopolitical landscape of the late Duecento, which paved the way for his exile and subsequent rancor that pervaded his later works.Publication The Human Moment of the Soul(2022-12-13) Bartolucci, LorenzoThis article explores the idea of the soul through the framework of two of the most elusive terms in Dante’s Commedia, “umano” and “persona.” It begins with an analysis of the soul’s formation, outlined in Purgatorio 25, by way of the conjunction of corporeal matter and a supernal “spirito novo,” which after death seems to ascend beyond the realm of human existence. This account is then contrasted with the etymological and theological affordances of the concept of personhood, which frames the body as the form—the “mask” of flesh and bones—that continues to individuate the soul after death, immortalizing rather than transcending the human moment of its origin. From the examination of these disparities emerges a new perspective on Dante’s conception of human existence, illustrating its complex but fundamental place within the idea of perfection at the heart of his poetic universe.Publication A World to See the Comedy by: Tom Phillips's Transmediations of Dante(2022-12-13) Petricola, MattiaBetween 1976 and 1989, the production of British visual artist Tom Phillips (b. 1937) found its main source of inspiration in Dante and particularly in his Inferno. This article aims to provide a new approach to the question that drives, directly or indirectly, most of the scholarship on Phillips’s reception of Dante: how can we best describe the relation between the text of the Comedy and the images by Phillips that accompany it? Rather than relying on notions such as “adaptation” and “illustration”—which might prove inadequate to account for the text-image relations in Phillips’s works—I would propose to interpret Phillips’s reception of Dante as an attempt to create “a world to see the Comedy by.” More specifically, the analyses that follow will have four objectives. First, I will provide an overview of the transmediation strategies deployed by Phillips across his Dante-related projects. Second, I will attempt to explain the system of relations that shapes Phillips’s Dante-inspired visual world and to show, more in general, how this world ‘works’ by drawing on Georges Poulet’s phenomenology of reading and Stanley Fish’s reader-response theory. Third, I will argue that Dante’s Inferno should not be seen as an illustrated book but rather as a livre d’artiste in which Phillips transmediates his aesthetic experience of the Inferno into a visual world whose unique iconography needs, in turn, to be explained to the reader-viewer in the form of a commentary. Fourth, I will show how Phillips’s Dantesque visual world and, more in general, Phillips’s very identity as an artist depend on his identification with Dante himself—or, rather, on his ‘absorption’ of certain traits of Dante’s otherworldly journey into the conceptualization of his own life journeyPublication BD 5 2022 Complete(2022-12-13) Bibliotheca Dantesca, Managing EditorsPublication Nicolò Crisafi. 'Dante’s Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the "Commedia."' Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.(2022-12-13) Cuadrado, AlejandroPublication 'Selve oscure e alberi strani.' Paolo Grillo, ed. Rome: Viella libreria editrice, 2022.(2022-12-13) Contreras, Lourdes