The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host research presentations by 4th-year students in the Italian PhD program. This year's speakers are: Elisa Bisson, Inha Park and Salvatore Riolo.
Elisa Bisson's presentation is titled:
Diagramming the cosmos, tracking the pilgrim’s journey: Iacomo della Lana’s cosmological diagrams on the Comedy
The paper introduces the first chapter of the dissertation, which investigates Iacomo della Lana’s encyclopedic commentary on Dante’s Comedy, emphasizing its pivotal role in shaping the early hermeneutical reception of the poem. Lana, in his commentary written in 1328, transformed Dante’s work into an authoritative repository of knowledge by combining allegorical exegesis with the encyclopedic tradition of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The first chapter examines Lana’s adaptation of the accessus genre, his scientific and philosophical quaestiones, and especially his innovative use of diagrams as multidisciplinary tools for learning and thinking. Since the sixth century, diagrams have been used to extract scientific knowledge from classical authors, such as Cicero, Lucan, Virgil, and Ovid. This diagrammatic practice was inaugurated by exegetes such as Macrobius and, later, developed by William of Conches in the twelfth century. Lana designed his diagrams to elevate the status of the Comedy, making it a universal and authoritative work worthy of study. He also sought to confer upon his commentary the authoritative weight of a didactic treatise. Lana’s cosmological diagrams, particularly those accompanying Paradiso 27 and Inferno 34, accomplished these goals by contextualizing Dante’s poetic cosmos within Aristotelian physics, transforming fiction into a vehicle of empirical truth. These diagrams consistently merge Dante’s cosmos with the actual universe, aiming to instruct Lana’s "studenti" on the workings of the material world and, at the same time, to present the Comedy as grounded in authentic astronomical and cosmological principles.
Inha Park's presentation is titled:
Corea: Modern Italy’s Collective of Internal Others
Corea (Italian for Korea) is a pejorative label, a placename, and an epithet used in the
postwar period to refer to impoverished urban shantytowns throughout Italy. In this presentation, I explore the significance of this surprising appellation in the Italian cultural, historical, and social context. Inspired by the Korean War (1950-1953) and the war-ruined image it created, the Coree created in various Italian cities exemplify Italy’s encounter with “an other Italy,” namely, southern Italy, Roman campagna, and urban slums: spaces othered by their perceived sociopolitical backwardness, primitive dwellings, inadequate infrastructure, and poverty from the unification-era to postwar economic development. Throughout history, modern Italy has discovered and designated these “other Italies” through the naming of its external Others, such as
“Africa,” “Cairo,” “Casbah,” “Congo,” “Corea,” “isole Figj,” “Indiani della Terra del Fuoco,”
“gli Abissini,” and “Sciangai.” Focusing on the commonalities between the two East Asian toponyms, I investigate the continuity between the 1930s label Sciangai (Italian for Shanghai), a term referring to damp and overcrowded slums in Italian cities like Rome, Bolzano, and Crotone, and the 1950s epithet Corea, applied to neighborhoods in Milan, Livorno, and Rosarno. Shaped by fascist-era discourses of land reclamation, housing eugenics, internal colonization, racial ideology, and fascist representations of East Asia, Sciangai came to signify disavowed by-products of Italy’s modernization. While Corea inherited much of this same symbolic baggage, it also reflected the economic boom, which brought with it mass migration for better life opportunities and everyday struggle of urban slum dwellers whose humble living conditions were perceived by the ruling classes as backward and less “civilized.” Examining a plethora of cultural productions including newspapers, magazines, periodicals, newsreels, travel writings, photographs, literary works, and movies made during the first half of the twentieth century, I demonstrate how changing ideas of Italianness emerged through the engagement with Others hailing from what Europeans have historically termed the “Far East,” whose alterity was projected back onto Italy’s unwanted internal Others.
Salvatore Riolo's presentation is titled:
"Poets Paint with Words" Refashioning the Commedia in Eighteenth Century Europe
This presentation examines the transformative impact of Jonathan Richardson’s (1667–1745) translation of Inferno XXXIII on eighteenth century Europe and the ways it fostered a refashioning of the sommo poeta. Richardson’s Discourse on the Science of a Connoisseur (1719) introduced Dante to a new readership by translating the Ugolino episode as an example of visual expressiveness and tragic sublimity. His comparison between history, poetry, and sculpture reframed Dante as a painter more than a poet, inaugurating an English tradition that linked Dantean imagery to the discourse of the sublime. The resonance of his treatise in continental Europe, coupled with an ever-increasing availability of printing edition of the Commedia in eighteenth century, produced a dynamic reception and reuse of Dante which refashioned his masterpiece and paved the way for the romantic revival. By exploring this timeframe, this presentation reconsiders the eighteenth century not as a nadir in Dante’s fortune but as a laboratory for Dante’s modern reception, refashion and translation.
Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.