In connection with the 2021 Dante centenary, the Devers Program in Dante Studies and the Center for Italian Studies are organizing a year-long lecture series, which will be held on the Notre Dame campus throughout the 2021 calendar year. The aim of the series is to assess the ways in which Dante has impacted the literary and popular culture of the United States. The series is divided into six sessions. Each session will consist of two speakers who will speak for 30-45 minutes each. The series will address topics including translation, iconography, library collections, the Civil War era, African-American literary culture, American religious culture, American poetry and narrative, and Italian-American culture.
In this session, Kathleen Verduin, Professor of English at Hope College, and Joseph Rosenberg, Assistant Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at Notre Dame, will give lectures on the topic of Dante and American narrative.
The Fall lectures are being planned in a hybrid online and in-person format. Please register here.
Kathleen Verduin, "'Was Then Your Image Like the Image I See Now?' Dante's Face in America"
This lecture will trace American responses to representations of Dante's features from the early nineteenth century until the First World War.
Kathleen Verduin is a professor of English at Hope College. She worked with her husband, Leslie J. Workman, to establish medievalism as a recognized area of academic investigation. Together, they established the book series Studies in Medievalism and the annual International Conference on Medievalism. She has published scholarly articles on American literature and a range of modern writers, especially John Updike. Her continuing project is on the interest in Dante shown by American literary figures from George Ticknor to Ernest Hemingway.
Joseph Rosenberg, “Dante, Jazz, and American Modernism"
Joseph Rosenberg is an assistant professor in the Program in Liberal Studies and is a literary critic specializing in modernism and its aftermath. His recent work has appeared in venues such as Modernism/Modernity, Critical Quarterly, and The Henry James Review. His first book, Wastepaper Modernism: Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Ruins of Print (Oxford, 2021) shows that the ever more avid interest writers took in new media like cinema obliged them to reflect on the materiality of the paper on which their own work (and so much else) was printed. Rosenberg is currently writing a second book, provisionally entitled Undone: Late Modernism and the Aesthetics of Failure, that examines modernism’s decline from a revolutionary impulse into a sigh of resignation.
Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.