Overview

Harvard University has played a fundamental role in Dante studies since the 19th century. The year 2021, the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri's death, also marks the 130th birthday of the Dante Society of America, founded at Harvard, which is one of the oldest scholarly organizations in North America (predating both the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association) and one of the first to include women among its founding members.

 

The Society, Harvard's literature departments, and its Extension School were largely responsible for bringing Dante into American classrooms, enabling the Comedy and Dante's other works to move, inform, entertain, and console generations of readers across temporal and cultural barriers.

 

It was at Harvard that T.S. Eliot read Dante, an encounter that changed the course of English literature, and which still can be seen in his annotated copy of the Comedy at the Houghton Library. As he later reflected, “The whole study and practice of Dante seems to me to teach that the poet should be the servant of his language, rather than the master of it." Other notable Harvard readers of Dante have included George Ticknor, Henry Longfellow, E.E. Cummings, William James, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Kevin Young.

 

In more recent years, far beyond the Yard, Dante’s description of his descent into Hell has informed stories of lives broken, twisted, and ended by the practice of human trafficking at the U.S.-Mexico border, most notably Alejandro Hernández's Amarás a Dios sobre todas las cosas (2013) and Emiliano Monge's Las tierras arrasadas (2015).

 

In keeping with Harvard's long and rich relationship with Dante and his works, Dante@Harvard offers a platform for lectures, performances, symposia, and exhibitions dealing with Dante's long and diverse cultural legacy. Drawing upon Harvard’s rich intellectual and material patrimony, Dante@Harvard will integrate existing and new courses, pedagogical and outreach activities, exhibitions, and performances, bringing together faculty and students from across Harvard's many schools, departments, centers, and committees.