Susanna Barsella graduated from The Johns Hopkins University and is Professor of Italian for the Modern Languages and Literatures Department and the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University. Dr. Barsella’s main area of research is in Italian Medieval literature with a specific interest in the literature of Early Humanism. Her publications range from Dante, to Petrarca, Boccaccio, Michelangelo, and on the idea of work from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Dr Barsella’s interests also embrace twentieth-century literature with publications on Pirandello, Gadda, and twentieth-century poetry. Her book In the Light of the Angels. Angelology and Cosmology in Dante’s Divina Commedia was published by Olschki in 2010. Co-edited with Francesco Ciabattoni she has published The Humanist Workshop. Essays in Honor of Salvatore Camporeale O.P. in 2012. Co-edited by A. Andreini, S. Barsella, E. Filosa, J. Houston, S. Tognetti, she has published the volume Niccolò Acciaiuoli, Boccaccio e la Certosa del Galluzzo. Politica, religione ed economia nell’Italia del Trecento, Rome, Viella, 2020. The book The Decameron Ninth Day in Perspective (Lectura Boccaccii Series IX), co-edited with Simone Marchesi for The University of Toronto Press, was published in May 2022. She has served as a member of the Council of the Dante Society of America and as Treasurer and Vice-President of the American Boccaccio Association. She is currently a co-organizer of the ABA-ENGB (American Boccaccio Association – Ente Nazionale Giovanni Boccaccio) Summer School in Latin Paleography.
Francesco Bausi was born and carried out his studies in Florence; in 1993-1994 he was a Fellow at Villa I Tatti, where he also served from 2010 to 2014 as a member of the International Selection Committee. Currently, he teaches Italian Philology and Medieval Literature at the University of Calabria (Cosenza); from 2003 to 2006 he also taught Italian Philology at the University of Bologna; in 2015 he was Visiting Professor of Italian Literature at the Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore). Francesco Bausi is the director of the literary review «Interpres», which is devoted to the literature of the 15th century, and a member of the Editorial Board of the series “I Tatti Renaissance Library”. His main research area is medieval and renaissance literature, but he also frequently works on Italian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has published critical and commented editions of works in Latin and Italian of Petrarch, Angelo Poliziano, Ugolino Verino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Niccolò Machiavelli and Erasmus. His most recent volumes are: Machiavelli (2005), Petrarca antimoderno (2008), Dante fra scienza e sapienza (2009), Umanesimo a Firenze nell’età di Lorenzo e Poliziano (2011), Il ‘Principe’ dallo scrittoio alla stampa (2015), Leggere il ‘Decameron’ (2017); and the critical editions of Erasmus’ Ciceronianus and of Poliziano’s Stanze per la giostra (both published in 2016).
Francesco Ciabattoni is Term Professor in Italian Literature in Georgetown College, Georgetown University. After his Laurea in lettere at Università degli Studi di Torino, he received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Prof. Ciabattoni has published in international journals on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Berto, Pasolini, Primo Levi and the history of Italian folk, rock and pop. Prof. Ciabattoni’s monograph Dante’s Journey to Polyphony (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2010) is a comprehensive study of the role of music in Dante’s Commedia. With Pier Massimo Forni he has edited The Decameron Third Day in Perspective: Volume Three of Lectura Boccaccii (University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2014). Professor Ciabattoni’s main research focus is the interplay of music and literature. His book La citazione è sintomo d’amore (Carocci, 2016) is a study of the intertextual practice of literary in Italian songwriters. He also publishes poems (on Gradiva, Breviario poetico, Poesia, Mensile internazionale di cultura poetica, In forma di parole) and is currently working on a book-length project about the representation of music, dance and drama in Dante’s works. He is the director of Italian Songwriters, a website with translations of and critical commentaries on Italian songs.
George Cochrane is an artist and Professor of Studio Art at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Born in 1971 at an American army hospital in Fürt, Germany, Cochrane grew up in Dublin, New Hampshire. His art training began at the Cambridge School in Weston, Massachusetts and continued at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where he received his B.A. He also earned an M.F.A. from Hunter College, City University of New York. His oil paintings, drawings, and prints have been exhibited at numerous venues, including Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York; Morris Museum, Morristown, New Jersey; Momenta Art, Brooklyn, New York; Repetti Gallery, Long Island City, New York; and Galerie Martin Kudlek, Cologne. His graphic novel work has appeared in various publications, such as ESOPUS and BOMB magazines. In addition, the first three chapters of his autobiographical graphic novel Long Time Gone debuted in 2009 at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, Massachusetts. More recently, at his solo show at 153 Coffey Street in Brooklyn, NY, Cochrane exhibited the first seven chapters of Long Time Gone, and his new illuminated manuscript of Dante’s Inferno (printed by Thornwillow Press), along with a series of paintings and additional works on paper. Cochrane lives with his wife, daughter, and dog in Brooklyn, New York.
Silvia De Santis is currently Postdoctoral Researcher at the State University of Milan, Department of Studi Letterari, Filologici e Linguistici, where she is working on the project Scrivere in francese e provenzale nell’Italia medievale: un metodo innovativo per lo studio delle scriptae galloromanze. She has been Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali of the University “La Sapienza” of Rome, where she studied the lexicon of emotions in Ancient French romance within the PRIN (Research Project of Relevant National Interest) Canone letterario e lessico delle emozioni nel Medioevo europeo: un network di risorse on line (bibliografia, manoscritti, strumenti multimediali). She obtained her PhD in Romance Philology from the University “La Sapienza” of Rome and subsequently a Diploma as Archivist Paleographer at the Vatican School of Paleography, Diplomatics and Archives Administration. Parallel to her interest in Dante and especially in connection with the visual reception of his works, her main research interests concern Occitan, old French and old Italian philology and linguistics. She has edited, with the transcription of the melodies, Il Mistero provenzale di sant’Agnese (Rome: Viella, 2016) and dedicated a monograph to William Blake’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Blake & Dante: A Study of William Blake’s Illustrations of the Divine Comedy including his critical notes, Rome: Gangemi, 2017). In 2018, she won a five-month research scholarship in the United Kingdom granted by the British Academy and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, for a project on William Blake’s influence on Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s Dantesque illustrations.
Gabriele Federici is “cultore della materia” (Italian literature) at the Department of Humanities of the University of Turin. He also teaches Italian at the Liceo d’Adda in Varallo. Federici earned a laurea in modern literature at the University of Turin with a thesis on contemporary Italian literature, “L’emozione del viaggio. Giovanni Battista Bazzoni e le sue prose odeporiche.” He contributes to the international peer-reviewed journals of literary criticism Italianistica, Otto / Novecento, Carte di viaggio, Studi Romani, and Settentrione, a magazine of Italo – Finnish studies of the University of Turku. He edited unpublished 19th-century travel journals (Giambattista Bazzoni, Da Milano a Napoli, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2009; L’emozione dell’avventura, le esperienze di viaggio di Giacomo Carelli di Rocca Castello, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2014) and he edited the unpublished letters of scientists Pietro Calderini, Antonio Garbiglietti, Gioachino Toesca di Castellazzo and traveler Giuseppe Regaldi. Federici has also published essays on little known aspects of the literary production of Ugo Foscolo, Silvio Pellico, Mario Praz.
Isabelle Levy is a Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia. She studies the relationships among the Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, and Spanish literary traditions of the medieval Mediterranean, with particular emphasis on how medieval Jewish literature serves as both a mediator and innovator across these hybrid environs. She is currently writing a book on Jewish erotic literature of the medieval Mediterranean. She has articles in A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, Volume II (“Hybridity through Poetry: Sefer ha-meshalim and the Status of Poetry in Medieval Iberia”) and in La corónica (“Romance Literature in Hebrew Language with an Arabic Twist: The First Story of Jacob ben El‘azar’s Sefer ha-meshalim”). Levy earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard (2014) and has held positions as Fulbright Fellow in Spain (2005-6), Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia (2015-2016), Medieval Fellow at Fordham University (2014-2015), the Stanley A. and Barbara B. Rabin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia (2016-2017), and lecturer at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies/Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia (Fall 2017).
Louis J. Moffa, Jr. is a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia’s Department of Italian and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He received a B.A. in Italian Studies with honors from Vassar College in 2018 and an M.A. in Italian from Columbia in 2019. Louis currently serves as Co-Chair of Columbia’s Italian Graduate Student Association. He is a member of the Dante Society of America, the American Boccaccio Association, and the Modern Language Association. His primary research is on medieval natural philosophy and its intersection with theology and narrative. In particular, Louis is interested in Dante’s engagement with astronomy and astrology across his writings.
Kristina Olson is Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University. Her research investigates the intersection of history and literature in the works of medieval and early modern Italian authors, paying particular attention to matters of language, gender and reception. She is the author of Courtesy Lost: Dante, Boccaccio and the Literature of History (published by University of Toronto Press in 2014); the co-editor of Boccaccio 1313-2013, published by Longo Editore in 2015; and several articles on Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, as well as the artist Sandow Birk. Together with Christopher Kleinhenz, she edited a second edition of the MLA volume, Approaches to Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy (2020). She serves as President of the American Boccaccio Association (2017-20).
Paulo de Tarso Coutinho (Souza. P.T.C.V.) is a Brasilian researcher from UNICAMP, Brazil who lives and works in Campinas SP. He holds a BA in Architecture from PUC Campinas, SP, Brazil, an MS in Multimedia from UNICAMP University, and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. He is also a graphic designer and painter. Paulo de Tarso’s research began by exploring a relationship between The Divine Comedy and the film Blade Runner and is now focused on the architecture of Hell based on Dante’s Inferno. His primary goal is to develop a 3D model to illuminate and explain certain passages in the poems of Dante Alighieri.
Stefano Pelizzari is a Ph.D. Candidate in ‘Philosophy and Human Sciences’ at the University of Milan, where he is working on a project about the logical terminology of Dante Alighieri’s Monarchia (Supervisor: prof. Luca Bianchi). He graduated at the University of Trento under the guidance of Professor Achille Varzi and he is an alumnus of the Collegio di Merito Bernardo Clesio. He is involved as a redactor in the project “Vocabolario Dantesco Latino (VDL)” (coordinators: G. Albanese, M. Tavoni, P. Chiesa). His main research interests are history of medieval logic, medieval philosophy and Dante’s reception in the Italian Renaissance. For his research he was awarded the Demattè Prize 2018, thanks to which he spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University (September 2019-Semptember 2020).
Arielle Saiber is Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures at Bowdoin College. She received her Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Yale University. Saiber’s books include Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language, Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy, and the co-edited anthology Images of Quattrocento Florence: Writings on Literature, History and Art. Her articles cover topics ranging from medieval and Renaissance literature and mathematics, literature & science, Renaissance advice manuals, and early print history, to Italian science fiction, genre theory, and experimental electronic music. In 2006 she built the web-based archive, Dante Today: Sightings and Citings of Dante’s Work in Contemporary Culture, which she now co-curates with Elizabeth Coggeshall. Saiber has served on the executive council and as Vice President of the Dante Society of America; on the executive board of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts; and on the executive committee of the Division of Literature and Science of the Modern Language Association. Her doctoral dissertation on Giordano Bruno won Yale’s Field Prize, and she received the Karofsky Prize for teaching at Bowdoin. She has been a fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Villa I Tatti – Harvard’s Center for Renaissance Studies. She also received an NEH Fellowship, the MLA’s Scaglione Publication Award, and the Newberry Library’s Weiss-Brown Publication Award for Measured Words. She is currently working on a book about symmetry as transformation in Dante’s Commedia.
Jenny Clark Schiff is currently a second year Ph.D. student in Philosophy at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Her research interests are in logic, ethics, and intersections between the two areas. She received her B.A. in Philosophy from Columbia College in 2012. As an undergraduate, she received a full scholarship to participate in the Carnegie Mellon Summer School in Logic and Formal Epistemology. In 2014, she was awarded a Fulbright research grant to study Philosophy in Italy through affiliations with the University of Naples Federico II and the University of Padua. She lived in Naples for two years during this time. She received her M.A. in Italian from Columbia University in 2017. Her contribution to Digital Dante evolved from her final paper for Professor Teodolinda Barolini’s “Studies in Dante” seminar in Spring 2017. As part of her Ph.D., she currently teaches Philosophy at The City College of New York and serves as an Ethics Fellow at The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She has also taught and assisted in teaching logic and ethics courses to middle and high school students, including at her alma mater, Horace Mann School.
Pieter Vanhove holds a Ph.D. in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Pieter is currently finalizing his first book project, which examines how the concept of universality was reimagined in French, Italian, and Chinese literary and visual culture in the wake of decolonization. His main research interests are postcolonial studies, critical theory, world literature, twentieth-century cinema, contemporary art, translatability, and the critique of universality. His contribution to Digital Dante originated as his final paper for Teodolinda Barolini’s yearlong Commedia seminar at Columbia in 2008-2009.
Vincenzo Vespri graduated in 1982 and got the diploma in mathematics in 1984 at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (the Italian university system at the time had a specificity compared to the American one). He was assistant of mathematical analysis at the Second University of Rome Tor Vergata from 1984 to 1988. He was Associate Professor from 1988 to 1994 (first in Milan and then in Pavia). Full Professor since 1994 (in L’Aquila until 1997 and, later, in Florence). Visiting Professor (for long periods) at Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, Australian National University and University of New South Wales. He is the author of more than 130 scientific publications. He edited the edition of 5 books. He has dealt with questions concerning the structural properties of solutions of parabolic or elliptic equations, generally non-linear. He was also interested in the applications of mathematics to Finance (he was responsible for a project of about 50 thousand euros), to Geo-Physics (he was responsible for a project of about 1.3 million euros) and to modern information technologies, blockchain technology in particular (responsible for various funded projects). He is involved in the evaluation of pure, applied and industrial research projects at regional, national and European level. He was a Sherpa for the Italian government’s ministry of education. In recent years he has also dealt with the relationship between science and literature (Dante in particular).
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