Teodolinda Barolini is Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian, Columbia University. She is a foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and the Accademia Olimpica, as well as Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Medieval Academy of America. She served as the fifteenth President of the Dante Society of America. Her awards include the Premio Flaiano in 2007 and the Premio Sapegno in 2021.
Barolini has written widely on Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, and the lyric tradition.
Barolini’s first book was Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the ‘Comedy’ (Princeton University Press, 1984; Italian trans. Il miglior fabbro, Bollati Boringhieri, 1993). In 1992, she published The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton University Press, 1992; Italian trans. La Commedia senza Dio: Dante e la creazione di una realtà virtuale, Feltrinelli, 2003). These books were followed by Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (Fordham University Press, 2006; Italian trans. Il secolo di Dante, Bompiani, 2012) and by her edition and commentary on Dante’s early lyric poetry. Rime giovanili e della ‘Vita Nuova’ (with notes by Manuele Gragnolati) was published by Rizzoli in 2009 and, in revised and expanded form by the University of Toronto Press in 2014: Dante’s Lyric Poetry: Poems of Youth and of the ‘Vita Nuova’: 1283-1292 (with translations of Dante’s poetry by Richard Lansing).
Barolini has also written an online commentary on the one-hundred canti of the Commedia, the Commento Baroliniano, located on Columbia’s website Digital Dante.
Her collection of new Dante essays, written between 2009 and 2021, is titled Dante’s Multitudes: History, Philosophy, Method and will be published by Notre Dame University Press in 2022. The Italian translation will be published by La Nave di Teseo.
The Undivine Comedy: Thirty Years Later 