The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures welcomes award-winning scholar, teacher, and digital humanist Guy P. Raffa for the 2021 Dr. Neil Euliano Lecture.
Exiled in death as in life, Dante has hardly rested in peace over the centuries. His bones have been entombed, condemned, contested, stolen, hidden, discovered and reburied. They have been exhumed, examined and relocated, even threatened with destruction by fire and bombing. Above all they have been worshiped like the relics of a saint. This talk presents the physical afterlife and graveyard history of the poet who gave the world its most enduring and influential vision of life beyond the grave with his Divine Comedy.
Guy Placido Raffa, associate professor of Italian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy (Harvard University Press, 2020). His previous books include Divine Dialectic: Dante’s Incarnational Poetry (University of Toronto Press, 2000) and The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy (University of Chicago Press, 2009), which is accompanied by the award-winning Danteworlds website.
This lecture is part of the activities to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri's death. The lecture will be presented and close captioned in English.
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