Elisa Bisson

Research and Teaching Interests

Dante Studies, Reception of the 'Comedy', Medieval Literature, Modern poetry

Biography

Elisa Bisson is a second year PhD candidate in Italian Studies. She has a degree in Italian Literature from University of Roma Tre, where she defended a thesis on Dante’s influence on Jacopo Alighieri’s Dottrinale. Subsequently, she also obtained her MA at the same university, focusing on the reception and distribution of Dante’s poem, in particular Bosone da Gubbio’s commentary on Dante’s Comedy, il Capitolo. Her current research focuses on the reception of the Comedy as an encyclopedic source of ontological knowledge: her study is supported by the presence of diagrams and visual schemes in the main commentaries (such as Andrea Lancia, Ottimo commento and Iacomo della Lana) that shows how Dante’s poem was read by his contemporary readers as a scientific and theological treaty. Moreover, she is interested in modern literature, in particular in Giovanni Pascoli’s poetry and its connection to the phenomenon of Italian emigration in the 19 th century.