Annual Dante Lecture

Alison Cornish
Professor of Italian
New York University

Sonus qui non est vox: Sound and voice in Dante

The soundscape of the Divine Comedy is both vocal and nonvocal.  This paper explores how Dante exploits what for his culture was a nontrivial distinction.

Professor Cornish’s research interests are primarily in the fields of Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature.  She is the author of Reading Dante’s Stars (Yale, 2000), Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge, 2011) and, most recently, Introduction, Headnotes, and Notes on Dante’s Paradiso, translated by Stanley Lombardo (Hackett, 2017).  She has published articles on Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, earlier Italian lyric, and Elsa Morante.  Recent articles include:  “Music, Justice and Violence in Paradiso 20” (Dante Studies 134 [2016]), “Words and Blood:  Suicide and the Sound of the Soul (Inferno 13)” (Speculum 91 [2016]), “Incarnation in Venice” (The Decameron: Fourth Day in Perspective, forthcoming).  The main themes of her research have been literature and science, vernacular translation, and currently the category of sound as material medium of music, language, and poetry.  She is currently Bibliographer for the Dante Society of America.