Alison Cornish

Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio; Medieval Italian literature; literature and science, philosophy, theology; vernacular translation

Curriculum Vitae

Alison Cornish joined the Italian Studies faculty at NYU first as Visiting Professor in Fall 2017 and then as Professor in Fall 2018.  She is currently Chair of the Department and President of The Dante Society of America.

At NYU's Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, together with Director Stefano Albertini, she began a lecture series entitled "Dante and…" featuring scholars and experts investigating Dante's relevance to difference areas of study and concern, with particular relevance to today's world.  Also in collaboration with Casa Italiana and the Dante Society of America, she spearheaded a year-long project of short conversations between different people on each of the 100 cantos of Dante's Divine Comedy.  The Canto Per Canto: Conversations with Dante in Our Time are curated by Casa, published on the Italian Studies Facebook page, prepared by members of the Dante Society of America and annotated by a team of graduate students from NYU and the University of Michigan.

Professor Cornish’s research interests are primarily in the fields of Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature, especially Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, with particular concern for scientific, philosophical and theological issues and their translation into the vernacular.  Before coming to NYU, she taught in the Department of Italian at Yale University and in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  She has held a University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities Fellowship, a Harvard University Villa I Tatti Fellowship, and a Fulbright Grant to Italy.

“A worldview requires a center.” Forum on Cosmology. Ed. T. Cachey. Dante Studies 140 (2022; but 2023): 152-160. 

“Dante’s Total Eclipses.” In Eclipse & Revelation: Total Solar Eclipses in Science, History, Literature, and the Arts. Ed. H. C. Lange and T. McLeish. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2024. 157-172.

“Cotanto Amante: Come ingannarsi sui fatti.” In Atti del Convegno Cinque Continenti per il V Canto. Ed. Ferruccio Farina. Florence: Vallecchi, 2023.

“‘Where the sì sounds’: Dante's dissonant vernaculars and their sensual signs.”  The Sound of Writing, ed. Steven Justice and Christopher Cannon. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. 200-214.

“Politics without Belief in the Divine Comedy.” Berkley Forum (https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/politics-without-belief-in-the-divine-comedy). 12 October 2021.

“Paradiso 29: Saving the Appearances.”  Dante Studies 137 (2019): 107-123.

"Sonus qui non est vox: Sound And Voice In The Body Politic." Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies 2.1 (2019).  

"Music, Justice and Violence in Paradiso 20." Dante Studies 134 (2016): 112-141.

"Words and blood: Suicide and the Sound of the Soul (Inferno 13)." Speculum 91.4 (2016):  1015-1026.  

“A Lady Asks: The Gender of Vulgarization in Late Medieval Italy.” PMLA 115.2 (2000): 166-80.  Reprinted in Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism on Guido Cavalcanti.  2013.