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Notre Dame humanities scholars meet with Roman colleagues
By Michael O. Garvey
July 10, 2007
If not exactly a Roman holiday, it was evidently as pleasant as one. Perhaps it could be called a Roman working vacation.
However described, the "Primo Colloquio" or First Colloquium, held in June at the University of Rome La Sapienza, clearly delighted the eight Notre Dame faculty members in attendance.
Largely the initiative of Theodore Cachey, chair and professor of Romance languages and literatures and director of Notre Dame's Devers Program in Dante Studies, and Piero Boitani, chair of La Sapienza's department of comparative literature, the meeting was collectively sponsored by the Devers Program, Notre Dame's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and La Sapienza's Faculty of Sciences and Humanities. It brought together 16 distinguished scholars from both institutions in the chapel of the La Sapienza's Villa Mirafiori to discuss their work.
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DellaNeva publishes new book on Renaissance literature
By Kyle Chamberlin
May 3, 2007
The fundamental aspects of Renaissance literary production are the subject of a new book edited by JoAnn DellaNeva, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures at the University of Notre Dame. Published by Harvard University Press, "Ciceronian Controversies" is a volume of The I Tatti Renaissance Library.
DellaNeva examines the two major factions of Renaissance writers, those who imitated only Cicero's Latin prose and those who were inspired by an eclectic array of literary models, with a compilation of previously rare period texts. The book includes letters by Angelo Poliziano, Paolo Cortesi, Pietro Bembo and Celio Calcagnini, among others.
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Theater proves perfect stage for Italian instruction
By Gail Hinchion Mancini
April 18, 2007
"Ragazzi," declares Laura Colangelo, calling the students of her Italian theater workshop to order in an O'Shaughnessy Hall classroom at Notre Dame.
The endearing term means "young people," and it's funny to hear her use it with authority. Colangelo is the teeniest person in the class, and so young-looking she could easily be taken for a college student.
A 2002 Notre Dame graduate, Colangelo has been teaching Italian at Notre Dame, Saint Mary's College, and at the high school level since then.
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Professor Bernard Doering's translation of Maritain biography wins awards
By Michael O. Garvey
January 19, 2007
"Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven," a biography by Jean-Luc Barré, translated by Bernard E. Doering, professor emeritus of Romance languages and literatures at the University of Notre Dame, and published by University of Notre Dame Press, has won two recent honors from the Catholic Press Association and the Association of American University Presses.
Jacques Maritain, born in 1882 to a French Protestant family, met Raïssa Oumansouff when they were both university students in Paris. Their subsequent love affair was sufficiently complex to include a mutual suicide pact revocable only on condition of their discovery of the meaning of human life and existence. Providentially, the revocation was delivered through their attendance at the lectures of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and the influence of their friendship with Léon Bloy, the novelist who famously said, "there is only one sadness in life: Not to be a saint." They married in 1904 and were received into the Catholic Church in 1906.
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Italian professor wins national book award
By Shannon Chapla
December 1, 2006
Christian Moevs, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded the Howard R. Marraro Prize by the Modern Language Association (MLA) for his recent book "The Metaphysics of Dante's `Comedy'," in which he sheds new light on the interpretation of Dante's "Divine Comedy."
Published by Oxford University Press, the book explores Dante's metaphysics - his understanding of reality. Moevs argues that if we are to resolve the central problem of the "Comedy's" claim that the status of revelation, vision or experiential record is more than imaginative literature, then Dante's metaphysics must be recovered. Through this exploration, Moevs arrives at the conclusion that Dante believed that all of what we perceive as reality is a creation or projection of conscious being, which can only be known as oneself.
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