History
The Dante Project of New York is a multi-year Dantean collaboration between Maria Luisa Ardizzone of New York University and Teodolinda Barolini of Columbia University. In its first phase the Project has been devoted to holding yearly conferences on each of Dante’s so-called “minor works”, thus producing a “global” reading of Dante (“lettura globale di Dante”).
This phase of the Project will culminate and conclude in a conference on the Commedia timed for the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth in 2021. To be held on October 22, 2021, the 700th anniversary conference will be devoted to “New Perspectives on a Secular Dante”.
After its first phase, which concludes in 2021, the Dante Project of New York will turn to a different format, to be announced, in which we will invite speakers on a yearly basis to contribute to an ongoing discussion of curated Dantean topics.
The seven yearly editions of the Dante Project of New York are as follows:
1st edition 2015: Monarchia
Dante as Political Theorist: Historicizing Theology and Theologizing Power
2nd edition 2016: Vita Nuova
Vita Nuova: Archeologies of a Text
3rd edition 2017: De Vulgari Eloquentia
De vulgari eloquentia: Dante’s Laboratory of Vernacular Speech
4th edition 2018: Convivio
Convivio: Dante’s Philosophical Treatise
5th edition 2019: Rime
Rime: Dante’s Workshop of the Heart
6th edition 2020: Epistles, Eclogues, Questio
Epistole, Ecloghe, Questio: Dante’s Epistles and His Latin Works of the Last Years
7th edition 2021: Commedia
New Perspectives on a Secular Dante
On this site you may find all the conference programs and links to the available videotapes.
An important intellectual pre-history of the Dante Project of New York is the conference of 2012 that Maria Luisa Ardizzone dedicated to the topic “Dante and Heterodoxy”. As a result of Ardizzone’s invitation to Barolini to present the Concluding Remarks of the “Dante and Heterodoxy” conference, an intellectual collaboration began. This collaboration led to the Dante Project of New York. The bold approach of the 2012 conference has informed all our work together and has inspired our 2021 conference on the Commedia.
Because of its importance in the genesis and history of the Dante Project of New York, we include the program of “Dante and Heterodoxy” among the programs on this site.
Three volumes have been published that are related to the work of the Dante Project of New York:
1. Dante and Heterodoxy: The Temptations of 13th Century Radical Thought, ed. and with an Introduction by Maria Luisa Ardizzone, with a Conclusion by Teodolinda Barolini, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.
2. Dante as Political Theorist: Reading Monarchia, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018.
3. Vita Nuova: Archeologie di un testo, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone and Teodolinda Barolini, Studj Romanzi 14 (nuova serie), 2018.
A fourth volume, collecting the papers of the Rime conference of 2019, is being prepared by Christopher Kleinhenz.
