Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952. His novels include Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982), The Black Book (1990), My Name is Red (1998), and Snow (2002). Pamuk's most recent book is Istanbul, a collection of the author's early memoirs and an essay about Istanbul. Apart from three years in New York, he has spent all his life in the same district of Istanbul, and he now lives in the building where he was raised. Pamuk's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Historian Philippe Buc on Religion and Violence

Philippe Buc has been at Stanford since 1990. He earned his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Sciences Sociales, Paris. His research has been concerned with religion and power in pre-modern western Europe, principally from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages, so the 2nd to 14th centuries of the Common Era. The geographic areas that he is most familiar with include what are now France, Germany, and the Low Countries, but given the translocal nature of political and religious elites in the Middle Ages, his space is by necessity the whole of Western Europe. His books are titled L'ambiguïté du Livre. Prince, pouvoir et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible [the ambiguity of the Book. Prince, power, and the people in biblical commentaries] (1994), and Dangers of Ritual (2001).

Robert Harrison on Dante and Prufrock

Robert Harrison on vice

Andrew Mitchell on Poetry and Thinking in Heidegger

Andrew J. Mitchell (Ph.D., Philosophy) works in the fields of 19th and 20th century German Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature, with emphases in the Philosophy of Nature (German Romanticism, American Transcendentalism), Critical Theory, and the History of Philosophy (ancient and modern). His research addresses questions of meaning, mediation, and materiality in philosophy and literature. Recent publications include “Heidegger and Terrorism” (Research in Phenomenology 35) and “Fassbinder: The Subject of Film” (Cinematic Thinking, forthcoming). Dr. Mitchell taught in the Philosophy department’s IHUM course “The Fate of Reason” this past winter-spring. He has previously taught the German Studies IHUM course “Myth and Modernity: Culture in Germany.” Dr. Mitchell also taught “Nietzsche and Wagner: On Decadence and Affirmation” (PHIL 64) for the Continuing Studies program in winter and “Heidegger and Poetry in an Age of Technology: Rilke, Trakl, Char” (GERGEN 282/FRENGEN 282) this past spring. As of Fall 2007 he will be joining the faculty of the Philosophy Department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Stephen Hinton on Kurt Weill- Part 1

Stephen Hinton is Professor of Music and Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has been on the faculty since 1994; from 1997-2004 he served as chairman of the Department of Music. After studying at the University of Birmingham (U.K.), where he took both a double major in Music and German and a Ph.D. in Musicology, he spent eight years at the Technische Universität Berlin, first as research assistant to the late Carl Dahlhaus and then as a “wissenschaftlicher Assistent.” From 1990 to 1994 he taught at Yale University. His publications include The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera for the series Cambridge Opera Handbooks, the critical edition of Die Dreigroschenoper for the Kurt Weill Edition (edited with Edward Harsh), Kurt Weill: Gesammelte Schriften (edited with Jürgen Schebera, and issued in 2000 in an expanded second edition), and the edition of the Symphony Mathis der Maler for Paul Hindemith's Collected Works. He has published widely on many aspects of modern German music history, with contributions to publications such as Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, New Grove Dictionary of Opera, New Grove Dictionary of Music, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and Funkkolleg Musikgeschichte. He has served as editor of Beethoven Forum and is currently completing a comprehensive study of Kurt Weill's works for the musical theater.

Stephen Hinton on Kurt Weill- Part 2

Stephen Hinton is Professor of Music and Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has been on the faculty since 1994; from 1997-2004 he served as chairman of the Department of Music. After studying at the University of Birmingham (U.K.), where he took both a double major in Music and German and a Ph.D. in Musicology, he spent eight years at the Technische Universität Berlin, first as research assistant to the late Carl Dahlhaus and then as a “wissenschaftlicher Assistent.” From 1990 to 1994 he taught at Yale University. His publications include The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera for the series Cambridge Opera Handbooks, the critical edition of Die Dreigroschenoper for the Kurt Weill Edition (edited with Edward Harsh), Kurt Weill: Gesammelte Schriften (edited with Jürgen Schebera, and issued in 2000 in an expanded second edition), and the edition of the Symphony Mathis der Maler for Paul Hindemith's Collected Works. He has published widely on many aspects of modern German music history, with contributions to publications such as Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, New Grove Dictionary of Opera, New Grove Dictionary of Music, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and Funkkolleg Musikgeschichte. He has served as editor of Beethoven Forum and is currently completing a comprehensive study of Kurt Weill's works for the musical theater.

Charitini Douvaldzi on Freud- Part 2

Charitini Douvaldzi holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Munich and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Her main field of research is German culture and literature between the 18th and 20th centuries. She works specifically on autobiography, the Bildungsroman, psychoanalytic and cultural theory, narrative, vision, and the arts of memory, and the ethics and aesthetics of incompletion. She teaches in the "Art of Living" track of Stanford's Introduction to the Humanities program, as well as undergraduate and graduate courses in German literature, such as "The Bildungsroman and Other Biographical Fictions," "Freud and the Enterprise of Psychoanalysis," and "Oedipus/Hamlet/Moses." She has published articles on Roman Jakobson and on the Bildungsroman and has given papers at numerous conferences and conventions. She is currently working on a book project entitled "Interrupting Infinity: Narrative, Synoptic Vision, and the Art of Memory."

Charitini Douvaldzi on Freud- Part 1

Charitini Douvaldzi holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Munich and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Her main field of research is German culture and literature between the 18th and 20th centuries. She works specifically on autobiography, the Bildungsroman, psychoanalytic and cultural theory, narrative, vision, and the arts of memory, and the ethics and aesthetics of incompletion. She teaches in the "Art of Living" track of Stanford's Introduction to the Humanities program, as well as undergraduate and graduate courses in German literature, such as "The Bildungsroman and Other Biographical Fictions," "Freud and the Enterprise of Psychoanalysis," and "Oedipus/Hamlet/Moses." She has published articles on Roman Jakobson and on the Bildungsroman and has given papers at numerous conferences and conventions. She is currently working on a book project entitled "Interrupting Infinity: Narrative, Synoptic Vision, and the Art of Memory."

Pierre Saint-Amand on the French Enlightenment

Pierre Saint-Amand holds joint appointments with French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. A graduate of the University of Montreal, he received his Master's and doctoral degrees in Romance Languages. from The Johns Hopkins University . Before taking a tenured position at Brown in 1986, he taught as assistant professor of French at Yale and Stanford. In 1991 and 2004 he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Romance Languages at Harvard University and in 2001 he taught as Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. He is the author of Diderot: le labyrinthe de la relation (1984), Séduire ou la passion des Lumières (1987), Les Lois de l'hostilité. La politique à l'âge des Lumières (1992), The Libertine's Progress (1994) and The Laws of Hostility (1996). He is the editor of Diderot, Le Roman au 18e siècle: Postérités, Autonomy in the Age of the Enlightenment. He has edited for Gallimard's Pléiade, Thérèse philosophe and Confession d'une jeune fille (2000, 2005). He has published widely on topics of literary criticism in journals such as Romanic Review, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth-Century, Stanford French Review, Critique, Furor, and Critical Inquiry. He was the recipient in 1986 of a Stanford Humanities Center fellowship, and in 1989 of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. He was named the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the Year (1995) and, in 1996, Francis Wayland Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature. He was inducted Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques in February 2001. Professor Saint-Amand has research interests in 18th-century literature, especially the novel, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and literary criticism and theory. He is currently working on a book, The Pursuit of Laziness: Idleness and the Philosophes.

Karen Feldman on Hannah Arendt – Part 1

Karen Feldman teaches in the Departments of Rhetoric and German. Her areas of specialization include hermeneutics and phenomenology, the Frankfurt School, German Idealism, feminist theory, literary theory and aesthetics. She is the author of Binding Words: Conscience and Text in Hobbes, Hegel and Heidegger (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming in 2005) and co-editor of Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (Blackwell, 1998). She has published articles on early modern and Continental thought in Journal of the History of Ideas, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Word and Image, Angelaki, Philosophy Today, and in edited collections.

Karen Feldman on Hannah Arendt- Part 2

Karen Feldman teaches in the Departments of Rhetoric and German. Her areas of specialization include hermeneutics and phenomenology, the Frankfurt School, German Idealism, feminist theory, literary theory and aesthetics. She is the author of Binding Words: Conscience and Text in Hobbes, Hegel and Heidegger (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming in 2005) and co-editor of Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (Blackwell, 1998). She has published articles on early modern and Continental thought in Journal of the History of Ideas, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Word and Image, Angelaki, Philosophy Today, and in edited collections.

Troy Jollimore on Tom Thomson in Purgatory

Troy Jollimore is an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico, and author of the poetry collection, Tom Thomson in Purgatory. Jollimore studied in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1999. His dissertation, on the relation between normative theories of ethics and the requirements of friendship, was advised by Harry Frankfurt and Sarah Buss and was selected by Robert Nozick for Garland Publishing’s Studies in Ethics series. His philosophical articles have appeared in journals including Canadian Journal of Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly and Philosophy and Literature. Prior to Princeton, he was an undergraduate at the University of King’s College and in the Philosophy Department at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Before joining the faculty at CSU Chico he taught at Georgetown University and the University of California, Davis. He has published poetry in journals including Exile Quarterly, PRISM International, MARGIE, and Ploughshares. His first book of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, was selected by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins for the 2005 Robert E. Lee & Ruth I. Wilson Poetry Book Award, and is the winner of the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Professor Jollimore’s areas of research interest include meta-ethics, normative ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of literature and film. He has taught courses on all of these topics, as well as on epistemology, ancient philosophy, the history of modern philosophy, and biomedical ethics. His current research concerns various topics in ethical philosophy, many having to do with the concepts of desert and loyalty and their relations to various ethical reasons and obligations, particularly in the context of personal relationships. In addition to serving as Director of the Humanities Center at CSU Chico, Professor Jollimore has also served on the Advisory Board of the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics (CAPE), as a faculty advisor for Phi Sigma Tau, the Philosophy Honors Society at CSU Chico, and as Coordinator for Theme S (Wealth, Power & Inequality) in the General Education Upper Division Themes Program. He also writes frequently for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, and is an occasional contributor to the Weblog PEA SOUP.

Josh Ober on Ancient Athenian Democracy

Josiah Ober holds the Constantine Mitsotakis Chair in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He divides his time and academic appointment between the Departments of Classics and Political Science, and has a courtesy appointment in Philosophy. He writes and teaches courses on various topics conjoining Greek history, classical philosophy, and political theory and practice. His most recent book Athenian Legacies: Essays on the Politics of Going On Together was published in fall 2005 by Princeton University Press. He is currently completing a book with the working title, Democratic Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens. In addition to his ongoing work on the politics of knowledge and innovation, he is developing a project on the relationship between democracy and inherent human capacities and the ethical implications of that relationship. Josh has authored or co-authored a number of other books, including Fortress Attica (1985), Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Athenian Revolution (1996), Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (1998). His writing for popular audiences includes The Anatomy of Error: Ancient Military Disasters and Their Lessons for Modern Strategists (1990 with Barry Strauss) A Company of Citizens: What the World's First Democracy Teaches Leaders about Building Great Organizations (2003 with Brook Manville). He has held residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center, Center for Hellenic Studies, Univ. of New England (Australia), Clare Hall (Cambridge), Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences , and Univ. of Sydney; research fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and Guggenheim; and has been a Visiting faculty at University of Michigan, Paris I-Sorbonne 2000, and UC-Irvine. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Montana State University (1980-1990), and Princeton University (1990-2006).

Stanford President John Hennessy on Stanford University

John L. Hennessy joined Stanford’s faculty in 1977 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering. He rose through the academic ranks to full professorship in 1986 and was the inaugural Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 1987 to 2004. From 1983 to 1993, Dr. Hennessy was director of the Computer Systems Laboratory, a research and teaching center operated by the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science that fosters research in computer systems design. He served as chair of computer science from 1994 to 1996 and, in 1996, was named dean of the School of Engineering. As dean, he launched a five-year plan that laid the groundwork for new activities in bioengineering and biomedical engineering. In 1999, he was named provost, the university’s chief academic and financial officer. As provost, he continued his efforts to foster interdisciplinary activities in the biosciences and bioengineering and oversaw improvements in faculty and staff compensation. In October 2000, he was inaugurated as Stanford University’s 10th president. In 2005, he became the inaugural holder of the Bing Presidential Professorship. A pioneer in computer architecture, in 1981 Dr. Hennessy drew together researchers to focus on a computer architecture known as RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer), a technology that has revolutionized the computer industry by increasing performance while reducing costs. In addition to his role in the basic research, Dr. Hennessy helped transfer this technology to industry. In 1984, he cofounded MIPS Computer Systems, now MIPS Technologies, which designs microprocessors. In recent years, his research has focused on the architecture of high-performance computers. Dr. Hennessy is a recipient of the 2000 IEEE John von Neumann Medal, the 2000 ASEE Benjamin Garver Lamme Award, the 2001 ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, the 2001 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, a 2004 NEC C&C Prize for lifetime achievement in computer science and engineering and a 2005 Founders Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He has lectured and published widely and is the co-author of two internationally used undergraduate and graduate textbooks on computer architecture design. Dr. Hennessy earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University and his master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Rachel Jacoff on Dante's Divine Comedy – Part 3

Rachel Jacoff is Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature and Professor of Italian at Wellesley College where she has been a member the faculty since 1978. She has also taught at the University of Virginia, Cornell University, and Stanford University. She received her B.A. with High Honors and Distinction in 1959 from Cornell University, an M.A. in English from Harvard in 1960 and the Ph.D. degree in Italian from Yale in 1977. Her major research interest is Dante's Divine Comedy. She has written many articles on Dante and co-authored a monograph on "Inferno II" (University of Pennsylvania Press) for the Lectura Dantis Americana series sponsored by the Dante Society of America. She edited a collection of essays by John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Harvard UP, 1986) which received Honorable Mention for the Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association. She co-edited and contributed two essays to The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante (Stanford UP, 1990). She also edited The Cambridge Companion to Dante (Cambridge UP, 1993), and is now at work on the second edition. She also co-edited The Poet's Dante, a collection of essays by twentieth-century poets. She has received fellowships from the NEH (1981-2, 1991-2), the Guggenheim Foundation (1993) and has been a fellow of the Bunting Institute, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti), the Stanford Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni, and the Bogliasco Foundation's Liguria Study Center. She was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 1996-97. She served as an assistant editor of Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy, and on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, the MLA Committee for the Teaching of Foreign Languages and Literature, and the Friends of the Harvard College Libraries. Her current research concerns Dante's role in contemporary poetry, Dante and the visual arts, and the representation of the body in the Divine Comedy.

Rachel Jacoff: Hell Is Other People in Dante's Inferno

Rachel Jacoff: Hell Is Other People in Dante's Inferno Rachel Jacoff is one of the leading lights in the small, close-knit world of Dante scholarship. In this Entitled Opinions episode on The Divine Comedy, she continues her conversation on The Inferno, with her former student, our Entitled Opinions host Robert Harrison, himself a major Dante scholar. Harrison begins by citing Homer's Illiad: "As the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity./The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber/ burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning./ So one generation of men will grow while another dies." Virgil picks up this evocative metaphor in The Aeneid, but its tone is more ominous and rueful among the dead of the underworld. No surprise, then, that Dante continues the figure of speech in Canto 3, as a nod to Virgil – but with an important difference: Dante emphasizes the singularity of each of the sinners, rather than their anonymity. Each resident of Dante's infernal world “chooses, does not simply suffer, individual fate.” They not only make choices, but they reenact those choices and their rationalizations in their soliloquies. And Dante the Pilgrim is drawn into each of their vices as he speaks to them. Eventually, Dante and Virgil hit bottom: “You think that the climax of The Inferno is going to be encounter with Satan – especially if you come to Dante from Milton," says Harrison. "But Dante's Satan is really a very uninteresting encounter. There's no dialogue. Satan is just this horrible, slobbering, three-mouthed figure. So the real terror does not come from this canto, but from the canto before, where Dante meets the figure of Ugolino.” Jacoff and Harrison discuss how the sins of the Inferno have social consequences, and are a violation of community – hence, hell is a lonely place, even when the characters are paired. Other people are part of their torture. This is the second of three Entitled Opinions episodes on Dante. Quotes Rachel Jacoff: “For most of the characters in the Inferno, their sins are dispositions that inform every stance they take – the way they relate to Dante, the way they relate to other sinners in their group.” “For Dante, sin is a violation of community. There are no sins that do not have social consequences.” “Part of the reason that The Inferno is full of solitaries is that sinners have cut themselves off.” “People are grouped together, but they're so alone. The presence of other people is part of the torture.” Robert Harrison: “When you get to the bottom of Dante's Inferno, you want to get out. We're convinced of the poetic justice of the punishments, but it's enough." “An eye for an eye is one thing, but an eye for an eye for eternity becomes really problematic. … We want a world of mercy, we want a world of grace.” “Each canticle ends on the stars. They come out of The Inferno seeing the stars again, and they come out of Purgatory ready to go to the stars. And then … The Paradiso.” “In Dante, Ulysses does not go home at all. He's the figure of the explorer, the man who lives for knowledge. He's a forerunner of the figure of the great age of discovery in the Renaissance, the discovery of the New World, the scientific spirit. Everything that Dante called male curiosità, bad curiosity, within a century would be exalted as one of the premiere virtues of the humanism of the Renaissance.” Rachel Jacoff’s major research interest is Dante’s Divine Comedy. She has written many articles on Dante and co-authored a monograph on “Inferno II” (University of Pennsylvania Press) for the Lectura Dantis Americana series sponsored by the Dante Society of America. She edited a collection of essays by John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (1986) which received Honorable Mention for the Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association. She co-edited and contributed two essays to The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante (1990). She also edited The Cambridge Companion to Dante (1993, 2007). She also co-edited The Poet’s Dante, a collection of essays by 20th-century poets. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1981-2, 1991-2), the Guggenheim Foundation (1993) and has been a fellow of the Bunting Institute, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti), the Stanford Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Villa Serbelloni, and the Bogliasco Foundation’s Liguria Study Center. She was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 1996-97. She served as an assistant editor of Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy, and on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, the MLA Committee for the Teaching of Foreign Languages and Literature, and the Friends of the Harvard College Libraries. Her current research concerns Dante’s role in contemporary poetry, Dante and the visual arts, and the representation of the body in the Divine Comedy. She is Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature and Professor of Italian at Wellesley College where she has been a member the faculty since 1978. She has also taught at the University of Virginia, Cornell, and Stanford. She received her B.A. with High Honors and Distinction in 1959 from Cornell University, an M.A. in English from Harvard in 1960 and the Ph.D. degree in Italian from Yale in 1977.

The Only Way Up is Down: Rachel Jacoff on Dante's Inferno

The Only Way Up is Down: Rachel Jacoff on Dante's Inferno The world of Dante scholars is a small and close-knit one, and Rachel Jacoff is one of its leading luminaries. In this Entitled Opinions conversation, she discusses The Divine Comedy, and more particularly The Inferno, with her former student, our Entitled Opinions host Robert Harrison, himself a major Dante scholar. They begin with the setting of the Divine Comedy, and the spiritual, existential, biographical, and political crisis in which it is born. The epic poem takes place in the Jubilee year 1300, when the Florentine was 35 years old, at the midpoint of his life. He was in the middle of two prose works he couldn’t finish, Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia. Instead, he undertakes the major work for which he is most remembered, The Divine Comedy. Entitled Opinions host and guest discuss the great poem’s background, the spiritual crisis that gave birth to it, the mysterious role of Virgil as Dante’s guide, and the role of women in the drama (both as mediators to Dante’s spiritual climb, and as sexual sinners in the Inferno). And, inevitably, they discuss the renowned Canto V, with the adulterous lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta. The discussion begins with the First Canto, and Harrison’s comments on the Florentine’s immortal opening to his Divine Comedy. Dante has hit an impasse in his life, and the only way up is down. This is the first of three Entitled Opinions episodes on Dante. Quotes Rachel Jacoff: “If we only had only the first canto, we wouldn't know anything about the political crisis, we wouldn't know about the exile, we wouldn't even know Dante was a Florentine. ... "The language is deliberately vague enough that almost everyone can find their own mid-life crisis in this language." “People have read this as a poem about depression, they have read it as a poem about many different things, because they're able to connect with the sense of a dead-end.” Robert Harrison: “The midpoint represents a turning point. The only way up is down.” “In Dante's age, there was no analysis or psychotherapy, no prozac. Help took a different form – the form of a literary ghost, the ghost of Virgil.” “He had been rereading Virgil's Aeneid. He landed in a dead-end as a result of reading Virgil, and so perhaps only Virgil could get him out.” “Sometimes the living adopt their ancestors, but sometimes the dead have a way of adopting the living.” Rachel Jacoff’s major research interest is Dante’s Divine Comedy. She has written many articles on Dante and co-authored a monograph on “Inferno II” (University of Pennsylvania Press) for the Lectura Dantis Americana series sponsored by the Dante Society of America. She edited a collection of essays by John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (1986) which received Honorable Mention for the Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association. She co-edited and contributed two essays to The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante (1990). She also edited The Cambridge Companion to Dante (1993, 2007). She also co-edited The Poet’s Dante, a collection of essays by 20th-century poets. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1981-2, 1991-2), the Guggenheim Foundation (1993) and has been a fellow of the Bunting Institute, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti), the Stanford Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Villa Serbelloni, and the Bogliasco Foundation’s Liguria Study Center. She was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 1996-97. She served as an assistant editor of Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy, and on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, the MLA Committee for the Teaching of Foreign Languages and Literature, and the Friends of the Harvard College Libraries. Her current research concerns Dante’s role in contemporary poetry, Dante and the visual arts, and the representation of the body in the Divine Comedy. She is Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature and Professor of Italian at Wellesley College where she has been a member the faculty since 1978. She has also taught at the University of Virginia, Cornell, and Stanford. She received her B.A. with High Honors and Distinction in 1959 from Cornell University, an M.A. in English from Harvard in 1960 and the Ph.D. degree in Italian from Yale in 1977.

Robert Harrison a monologue on Gardens

Robert Harrison a monologue on Birds