Dante mosaic in the Times Square Subway Station, New York, NY
Photo by Steven Bartus (Bowdoin, ’08)
This website archives references to Dante and his works in popular and contemporary culture, of the twentieth century and beyond. Dante “sightings” and “citings” range from the cursory to the extensive, and from a place of superficial knowledge of Dante and his works to deep familiarity with them. We leave to the readers the opportunity to judge the nature and depth of each reference, to organize and classify the references according to their own ways of reading, and to note the frequency of certain themes over others.
Dante Today has been online since 2006. Inspired by the students in her “Dante’s Divine Comedy” course, Arielle Saiber (Bowdoin College) created the site to archive the references to Dante and his works that her students kept finding and bringing to her. In 2012, Elizabeth Coggeshall (Florida State University, formerly Stanford University) joined the editorship of the project, after teaching a course entitled “Dante and the Modern Imagination.”
As a digital archive, Dante Today hopes to serve as a curated, crowd-sourced repository that brings to light Dante’s sustained presence in contemporary culture. The goals are twofold: 1) to provide a central access point for said references; and 2) to offer data that students and scholars of Dante can use to think about the Nachleben (“afterlife”) of Dante’s works in relation to reception theory, resonance, and cultural studies. We invite you to browse, contribute, and engage with the materials (including teaching resources, links, and bibliography) collected here.
Founder
Arielle Saiber, Bowdoin College
Co-Editors
Arielle Saiber, Bowdoin College (2006 – )
Elizabeth Coggeshall, Florida State University (2012 – )
Web Design
Robert Denton (2006 – 2007)
David Israel (2008 – )
Gretchen Williams (Bowdoin ’14, summer 2013)
Robert Kerr (2014)
Research & Editing
Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin ’07, summer 2007)
Paige Gribb (Bowdoin ’14, 2010 – 2011)
Mary Ridley (Bowdoin ’12, 2011 – 2012)
Michael Hannaman (Bowdoin ’13, 2012 – 2013)
Gretchen Williams (Bowdoin ’14, 2013 – 2014)
Elena Stephenson (Stanford ’14, spring 2014)
May Peterson (Stanford ’17, 2014 – 2015)
Dean Zucconi (Bowdoin ’18, summer 2017)
Aki Jones (Florida State ’21, 2018 – 2019)
Gabriel Siwady (Bowdoin ’19, summer 2019)
Alexa Kellenberger (Florida State ’22, 2018 – 2020)
Luis Sanchez (Florida State ’21, 2019 – 2020)
Laura Chatellier (Florida State ’23, 2020 – present)
Jasmine George (Florida State ’24, 2020 – present)
Sponsors
Bowdoin College (2006 – )
Florida State University (2017 – )
Past Sponsors
Stanford University (2012 – 2016)
Dante Today has been generously supported by funds from Bowdoin College, the Roberts-Marton Fund for Italian Undergraduate Studies at Stanford University, and the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program and the Demos Institute for Data Humanities at Florida State University.
