Baylor’s Great Texts Program Will Welcome Scholar for Lecture on Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’
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Media contact: Terry Goodrich, (254) 710-3321
WACO, Texas (Nov. 10, 2015) – Baylor University’s Great Texts Program in the Honors College will welcome Giuseppe Mazzotta, Ph.D., for a lecture on Dante’s “Divine Comedy” at 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12, in the Alexander Reading Room as part of the Pence Lecture Series.
Mazzotta is the Sterling Professor in the Humanities for Italian and chairman of the department of Italian language and culture at Yale University.
His lecture is titled “Dante’s Theology of the Future: Inferno XIX and Paradiso XXXIII.”
“Dr. Mazzotta is one of the world’s leading authorities on Dante,” said Phillip Donnelly, Ph.D., associate professor of literature and director of the Great Texts Program. “The ‘Divine Comedy’ centrally concerns how exile becomes pilgrimage – in effect, how a person goes from being a refugee to finding one’s true home. Few topics are more urgent or timely in our convulsed and rootless world. Dante’s understanding of time enables the hope that makes possible the transformation of exile into homecoming.”
Mazzotta served as the president of the Dante Society of America from 2003 to 2009. He has written numerous essays about every century of Italian literary history and is the author of several books, among them “Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy” and “Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge.” He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University and his M.A. and B.A. from the University of Toronto.
The Pence Lecture series is sponsored by Susan and Robert Pence and the Great Texts Program and is designed to share the riches of Italian culture with Baylor students.
This event is free and open to the public.
The Alexander Reading Room is located inside Alexander Residence Hall at 1413 S. Seventh St.
For more information, contact the Great Texts Program at 254-710-7251.
by Ashton Brown, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805
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