Roberta Antognini
Roberta Antognini is originally from Canton Ticino in Switzerland, and has a Laurea from the Università Cattolica di Milano and a PhD from New York University. She is Associate Professor Emerita of Italian Studies at Vassar College. After retiring she has continued to read, write and translate poetry. She is the author of a monograph on Petrarch’s letters, Il progetto autobiografico delle Familiares di Petrarca (2008), and co-editor of the collection of essays Poscritto a Giorgio Bassani (2012). In collaboration with Deborah Woodard, she has translated into English Amelia Rosselli’s collections, Hospital Series (2015) and Obtuse Diary (2018), and the long poem The Dragonfly (forthcoming 2022). Presently she is co-translating with Peter Robinson Bassani’s poems, In rima e senza (In Rhyme and Without).
Maria Luisa Ardizzone
Maria Luisa Ardizzone is Professor of Italian Literature at New York University, NY. Ardizzone’s publications include: The Young Dante: Archetypes of his Early Intellectual Biography, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022; Reading as the Angels Read. Speculation and Politics in Dante’ s Banquet, Toronto University Press, 2016; Dante: il paradigma intellettuale. Un’inventio degli anni fiorentini, Olschki, 2011; Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages, Toronto University Press, 2002, Italian translation: Guido Cavalcanti. L’altro medioevo, Fiesole: Cadmo, 2006; Ezra Pound, Machine Art and Other Writings. The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996; German Translation: 2005; Polish Translation: 2003; Ezra Pound e la scienza. Scritti inediti o rari, Milano: Scheiwiller, 1987.
Lina Bolzoni
Lina Bolzoni is a Professor of Italian Literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where she has also served as Dean of the Classe di Lettere e Filosofia. Since 2000, Dr. Bolzoni has been the director of the Centro per l’Elaborazione Informatica di Testi e Immagini nella tradizione letteraria and a Visiting Professor at many European and American universities, including Harvard University, UCLA, New York University, and the Collège de France. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities and a Whitney J. Oates Short-Term Fellow of the Humanities Council at Princeton University.
Grace Delmolino
Grace Delmolino (PhD Columbia 2018) is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of California, Davis and Associate Editor of Digital Dante. Her first book argues that Boccaccio was a cutting-edge legal theorist of consent, drawing on his training in canon law (and especially on Gratian’s Decretum) to advance a broadly applicable vision of consent and autonomy. She has also published on conjugal debt in Decameron 2.10 (in the volume Reconsidering Boccaccio), on gendered power and agency in Decameron 9.7 (for The Decameron Ninth Day in Perspective), and on the legal sources of Dante’s bolgia of fraudulent counsel (forthcoming in Speculum).
Laura DiNardo
Laura DiNardo is a PhD candidate in Columbia’s Department of Italian and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Dante, Philosopher of Language” draws from the methodologies of analytic philosophy of language to technically examine how Dante performs his own linguistic theory in the Commedia. Laura received her BA in Linguistics from Yale University and her MA and MPhil in Italian from Columbia University.
Martin Eisner
Martin Eisner is Professor of Italian and Chair of Romance Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Dante’s New Life of the Book (Oxford UP, 2021) and Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature (Cambridge UP, 2013). In addition to two co-edited volumes on Boccaccio, he has recently completed a critical biography for Reaktion Books called Boccaccio, the Disguised Revolutionary.
Manuele Gragnolati
Manuele Gragnolati is Professor of Italian Literature at Sorbonne Université, Associate Director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. He has written the monographs Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Medieval Culture (2005), Amor che move: Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante (2013), and Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue (2020, with Francesca Southerden), and coedited numerous volumes, including Aspects of the Perfomative in Medieval Culture (2010), Dante’s Plurilingualism (2010), Metamorphosing Dante (2011), Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages (2012), Vita nova. Fiore. Epistola XIII (2018), The Oxford Handbook of Dante (2021), and Openness in Medieval Europe (2022).
Akash Kumar
Akash Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley. His research primarily focuses on Dante and 13th-century Italian lyric through the lens of the history of science, Mediterranean and global exchange, and digital humanities. Recent work includes collaborating with Richard Lansing on the first complete English translation of the poetry of Giacomo da Lentini, contributions on Dante to Wiley-Blackwell’s Companion to World Literature, the Oxford Handbook of Dante, and a forthcoming volume on Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present. He is currently finishing his first book, Dante’s Elements: Translation and Natural Philosophy from Giacomo da Lentini to the Comedy.
Giuseppe Ledda
Giuseppe Ledda is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna. His main research field is Dante and medieval literature, with special focus on Dante’s use of classical, biblical, and hagiographical models; animal similes in comparison with the medieval bestiary; ineffability in its rhetorical and theological aspects. He also works on Renaissance (Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto) and Novecento Italian literature (Montale, Atzeni). He has published several articles and some books on Dante. He is a senior editor of the journal “L’Alighieri” and a member of the Committee of the Italian Dante Society.
Louis Moffa
Louis Moffa is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in Italian and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His primary research is on Dante and the history of science, principally astronomy and physics. His dissertation, tentatively titled ‘Dante, Poet of the Stars,’ seeks to offer a comprehensive analysis of the many references to the stars in the Commedia.
Kristina Olson
Kristina Olson is Associate Professor of Italian and the Associate Chair and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University. She is the author of Courtesy Lost: Dante, Boccaccio and the Literature of History (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and articles on Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. She is the co-editor of three volumes, including Approaches to Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy (second edition) with the Modern Language Association (2020). She serves as the President of the American Boccaccio Association (2020-2023). Her talk today relates to her current book project, titled Sartorial Poetics in Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch.
F. Regina Psaki
F. Regina Psaki is Professor Emerita of Italian at the University of Oregon. She has published scholarly studies of narrative and authorial voicing in Dante, Boccaccio, and medieval imaginative fictions. She has translated chivalric romances from French and Italian: Il Tristano Riccardiano (2006), Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole (1995), and Le Roman de Silence (1991). She is currently focusing on less widely-read but representative medieval works, including misogynous diatribes and defenses of women in Italian and French, and vernacular treatises vulgarizing medieval science
Joseph Romano
Joseph Romano is a PhD candidate in the department of English and Comparative Literature. His dissertation, “Steryngs” of the Will: Issues of Volition in Late 14th Century English Literature, develops a literary history of the will in Middle English texts, especially the Cloud of Unknowing. His research also focuses on Dante and his reception of scholasticism, especially as related to questions of love, passion, and soul.
H. Wayne Storey
Wayne Storey is professor emeritus of Italian/Medieval Studies at IU–Bloomington, the Founding Editor of Textual Cultures and former president of the Society for Textual Scholarship. One of the leading proponents of material philology in the U.S. and Italy, Storey is a specialist of medieval manuscripts in Italian, Latin and Old Occitan. A long-time collaborator with Teodolinda Barolini, he has authored or coauthored seven volumes, including Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric (1993) and the two-volume facsimile edition/commentary on Petrarch’s partial autograph of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Vat. Lat. 3195 (Vatican–Antenore 2003-2004). He is currently completing a material commentary for his new digital edition of Petrarch’s Fragmenta (http://petrarchive.org).
The Undivine Comedy: Thirty Years Later 