EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | "The Lives of Beatrice: The Muse Who Made Us Modern"
Presented by Dr. Joe Luzzi
with Additional Commentary by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero

In this presentation, Professor Luzzi will explore the centuries-old unresolved question: who was Dante’s muse, Beatrice? Looking beyond Dante’s mythmaking, Luzzi considers the historical reality of the young Florentine woman Beatrice Portinari who first inspired Dante to write poetry and then sent him into a personal (and artistic) crisis when she died tragically at the age of 24, before eventually being poetically resurrected by Dante decades later in his epic The Divine Comedy. Luzzi will then discuss how this “muse” figure of Beatrice would go on to shape modern notions of female identity in later authors ranging from Petrarch and Cervantes to the English Pre-Raphaelites and James Joyce.

The webinar will include a 45-minute lecture followed by 15-minutes of Q&A.

Please note:

• Your participation is confirmed once you have purchased your ticket. You will receive the Zoom link to join the presentation circa 30 minutes before the start time.
• VIDEO RECORDING of the webinar will be available for unlimited streaming at your convenience for 7 days after the event.

Joseph Luzzi (PhD Yale) is Professor of Comparative Literature and Faculty Member in Italian Studies at Bard College and was recently a Wallace Fellow at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, where he was writing a cultural history of Dante’s Divine Comedy that will appear with Princeton University Press. He is the author of Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale University Press, 2008), which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), a finalist for the international prize “The Bridge Book” Award; My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love(HarperCollins, 2015), which has been translated into Italian, German, and Korean.