The Dante Society of America is sponsoring four panel sessions at the 2025 Annual Convention of the Renaissance Society of America, which will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, 20-22 March 2025. Descriptions of each panel follow below.
Friday March 21
Dante as Syncretic Philosopher: Politics, Philosophy, and Allegory in Dante’s Works
9:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Boston Westin Copley Place - Newbury Room - 2nd Floor
Chair, Jason Aleksander, San Jose State University
- Matteo Pace (Connecticut College), "Medicine as Syncretism in the Commentary Tradition of the Commedia"
- Dr. Gregory Stone, Louisiana State University), "Dante’s Passible Intellect: The Averroism of Paradiso’s Final Verses"
- Paul Stern (Ursinus College), "Dante’s Political Philosophy: Re-Thinking Paradiso"
- Alexander Eliot Schmid, Louisiana State University), "Dante’s Syncretism: Revelatory or Rationalist?"
Dante’s Paradiso I: Philosophical and Theological Traditions
1:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Boston Westin Copley Place - Newbury Room - 2nd Floor
Chair: Alison Cornish, New York University
- Stefano Scandella (New York University), "'Quando l’uomo ascende in cielo, ello è contro natura': Dante’s (Un)natural Ascent as (In)formative Violence"
- Susanna Barsella (Fordham University), "Falling from Heaven"
- Thomas L Cooksey (Armstrong State University), "Dante and the Nine Worthies: Fame or Glory"
- Rookshar Myram (University of Notre Dame), "Language, Sacred and Unstable: Adam, Christ, and the Vernacular Legitimacy of Dante’s Commedia"
Dante’s Paradiso II: New Perspectives
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Boston Westin Copley Place - Newbury Room - 2nd Floor
Chair: Theodore J. Cachey, University of Notre Dame
- Chiara Sbordoni (University of Notre Dame), "'La forma general di paradiso' (Par. XXXI, 52) from the Vita Nova to the Commedia"
- Maria Irene Fiducia (Brown University), "Dante’s Great Chain of Knowledge: A Narratological Reading of the Third Cantica"
- Virginia Lauria (Sapienza Università di Roma), "Aesthetics of Contemplation: Mysticism and Byzantine Art in Dante’s Paradise"
- Glenn A. Steinberg (The College of New Jersey), "A Poet’s Paradise: Dante’s Innovative Imagery in the Paradiso"
Dante’s Paradiso III: Receptions
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Boston Westin Copley Place - Newbury Room - 2nd Floor
Chair: Filippo Gianferrari, University of California, Santa Cruz
- Mr. Ianick Takaes de Oliveira, Columbia University), "'Potentes potenter tormenta patientur': Apocalyptic Prophecies in Philippe Thomassin’s Last Judgment (1606)"
- Giacomo Berchi (Stanford University), "Epic Paradise: Camões, Dante, and the Machine of the World"
- Giulio Genovese (The Pennsylvania State University), "No Women in Heaven: Monique Wittig’s Conceptualization of Dante’s Paradiso in Virgile, non"