Visiting Scholars series at Church of the Red Rocks

Church of the Red Rocks, 54 Bowstring Drive, Sedona

Valerio Ferme,  Dean of the NAU College of Arts and Letters

Tuesday, January 23 at 4:30 p.m.
"Why Dante’s vision of the afterlife still fascinates us today”

The Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, Valerio Ferme, will give a lecture on the reasons why Dante’s fictional depiction of the afterlife still carries meaning for people many centuries later. By inserting it into the cultural context of the Middle Ages, but making it relevant to our contemporary life, Professor Ferme will show how we can still learn many aspects of being human from a book that is now over seven centuries old.

Tuesday, February 20 at 4:30 p.m.
“Reading the World’s Politics through Dante Seven Centuries Later”

The Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, Valerio Ferme, will follow up his lecture on January 23rd with a lecture about the political worldview that Dante presents in the Divine Comedy, and will use it to show how, in many ways, the political issues that were relevant to Dante are still relevant today. The lecture will also offer the opportunity for the audience to open up discussions about what it means to be an engaged scholar like Dante in a world where scholars are often not very political at all. 

Valerio Ferme is Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Northern Arizona University. After receiving his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998, he became professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, then its divisional dean for Arts and Humanities. He has published two single-authored books, Tradurre è tradire. La traduzione come sovversione culturale sotto il fascismo (Longo, 2002), and Women, Enjoyment, and the Defense of Virtue in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Palgrave, 2015); and co-authored one (Italy and the Mediterranean in the Post-Cold War Era, Palgrave, 2013 with Norma Bouchard). He has co-edited and co-translated books, and published more than 50 articles and reviews. He is currently president of the American Association of Italian Studies, and is working on the translation of a book on concentration camps in Italy under Fascism. He has received much recognition for his work.