Robert Hollander - Georgia Nugent, Illinois Wesleyan University

This reflection was originally presented as a talk during an online tribute to Robert Hollander (1933-2021) and John Freccero (1931-2021) presented by the Dante Society of America following its 140th annual meeting on May 7, 2022. For more information about the tribute, including a videorecording and links to the remarks given by other presenters, please see "Quel Savio Gentil: Remembering our Teachers," posted under the "Pedagogy" section of Dante Notes.


First, I am deeply honored to be asked to participate in this tribute to Bob Hollander. It’s a very difficult task, because there is so much to say. Bob had a tremendous influence on my life, both professionally and personally. I will divide my comments here into two parts: experience with Bob as an undergraduate, and also after those undergraduate years.

To be clear about Bob’s influence, I need to say a word about my own background. And it’s probably fitting, since today is Derby Day. I grew up on the racetrack; my father and both my grandfathers were thoroughbred horse trainers. We followed the racing season, moving from track to track. So, before university, I grew up essentially transient.

Princeton was a revelation to me, a door into a completely different world. And Bob was a big part of that. I took, I believe, two of his European Literature courses: essentially surveys, introducing me to authors that I had never heard of in the —usually pretty bad— schools I attended. And, of course, I took the Dante course, the “Organic Chemistry” of Humanities, as it’s been called. These studies led me to write my senior thesis on Dante and Vergil —with Bob as my advisor. And I’ll say a bit more about his undergraduate teaching at the close of my remarks.

But as influential as Bob was intellectually for me, perhaps he (and his wife, Jean) were even more so personally. I babysat often for their two young children. Bob would drive me out to their extraordinary home in the country. It was, to me, an amazing place —designed by his brother, an architect. The enormous living room had grand, floor-to-ceiling French doors and looked like a ballroom. Adjoining was a very formal dining room. A peacock roamed the grounds.

But the heart of the house was a welcoming kitchen, full of things I’d never encountered. I don’t think I’d ever had espresso —and served with a lemon twist? Who knew such things existed? Certainly not me. Bob and Jean introduced me to an idea of elegance, a cosmopolitan, as well as intellectual life. (When the kids were asleep, my recollection is that I divided my time about equally between my Vergil homework and Jean’s Harper’s Bazaar fashion magazines!)

But the relationship with Bob didn’t end with graduation. In one of his classes I had written an essay on the Vita Nuova. Bob wrote a comment on that paper that incentivized me in a unique way. He must have liked the argument of the paper, but thought the writing needed work. And he must have known that I was interested in fashion. His comment was, “It’s like you’re wearing the most beautiful dress at the ball. But you’re dancing in tennis shoes.” (Now, today’s young women might actually do that —but back then, it was glass slippers all the way!) Nothing could have prodded me more to revision.

Even after graduation, I was determined to improve that paper. By this time, Dante was so much a part of my life that I petitioned my graduate department at Cornell to let me in enroll in the undergraduate Dante course, and I had the opportunity to study with Giuseppe Mazzotta. During the summer, I worked on revising that paper. In 1973, it was awarded by this Society The Dante Prize.  (I note there have been 13 Princeton honorees since then, clearly a tribute to the teaching of Robert Hollander and his wonderful successor, Simone Marchesi.)

But I was not the only student who remained engaged with Bob —and with Dante— after graduation. In 1977, Bob began offering an annual Dante Seminar. Reunions at Princeton are an enormous big deal, drawing as many as 10,000 people to a multi-day celebration. Predictably, beer usually dominated the affair.

For four decades, every Friday afternoon of Reunions at 4 o’clock, Bob offered a seminar-style discussion of Dante. The passage to be discussed was assigned ahead of time and distributed to a list (eventually) of hundreds of former students, some number of whom would gather each year for the discussion. (The tradition became so well-known and popular that the university began adding much more academic content to the Reunion weekend.)

And then, after about a quarter century of The Dante Seminar, at the turn of the millennium, a few of Bob’s students decided it was time for a Super Seminar. We would not only gather on campus to study Dante: we would go to Italy. And we would study together, not just for an hour but for a week. In 2000, about 30 of Bob’s students began to gather together biennially in a castello outside Florence for a glorious week together. We would read and discuss Dante for hours each day, break bread together in the cortile, in the evening put on performances both professional and amateur. And, in short, enjoy a truly remarkable fellowship that Bob’s generosity as a teacher had brought about.

The tradition continued for a decade and more, until Bob’s health made it untenable. I think all of us who participated remember this as a magical time. Some few of us were academics, but there was a poet, a pediatric oncologist, a librarian, a financier, an opera singer, lawyers, a concert-level pianist. All of us around a seminar table with our battered, dog-eared copies of the Commedia (in Sinclair’s translation, before Bob and Jean collaborated on theirs). Passionate discussion would take place—about theological references, Florentine history, allegory, poetics. That passion, that continued engagement with Dante after decades was the clearest evidence there could be of how Bob’s teaching changed lives.

And I want to conclude with my two most powerful memories of his undergraduate teaching. At some point, early on in his career, Bob developed the habit of including students’ thoughts and comments in his text as marginalia. So, for example, you might be sitting in the Dante seminar decades later and hear Bob call out your name and mention the comment you had made on a certain passage in the Commedia. Your opinion mattered and was to be taken seriously; he invited you into the company of scholars. 

And the memory of Bob that has never left me in all these years is how he would almost bound into the classroom, all excitement, waving the day’s text in his hand, saying, “Isn’t this GREAT?! I stayed up all night reading this!” And we would launch into the day’s discussion. 

I thought to myself: That sounds like a pretty good life to me. I think that’s what I want to do with my life. And that’s what happened.