2 pm, 6191 Helen C. White: Workshop for graduate students and faculty. Please contact Professor Jelena Todorovic (jtodorovic@wisc.edu) for the reading.
5 pm, 6191 Helen C. White: Public lecture: Cowardice is Political: The Legacy of Inferno 3 in 20th- and 21st-Century America
“Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.” So wrote President John F. Kennedy, believing that he was citing Inferno 3 in his remarks at the signing of a charter establishing the German Peace Corps (June 24, 1963, in Bonn, West Germany). Dante’s idea of cowardice has been appropriated in literary and political discourse through the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, particularly in the American political arena. Olson’s talk aims to connect Dante’s poem with this interpretive afterlife by focusing on the poet’s vision of cowardice as a civic sin, namely as the refusal to act in a time of crisis.
Kristina Olson (PhD, Columbia University, 2006) is an Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University. She is the author of Courtesy Lost: Dante, Boccaccio and the Literature of History (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and several articles on Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. She is the co-editor of three volumes: Open City: Seven Writers in Postwar Rome (Steerforth Press, 1997); Boccaccio 1313-2013 (Longo Editore, 2015); and Approaches to Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy (second edition) with the Modern Language Association (2020).
Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies (CES), the Department of French and Italian, the Departments of English and History, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, and the Anonymous Fund.
For further information, contact Jelena Todorovic, jtodorovic@wisc.edu