Date/Time
Thursday
22 Feb 2024
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Location
470 Stephens Hall

Event Type
Colloquium

Akash Kumar
Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley

This talk will consider how Dante deploys the language of science in his Divine Comedy to reorient the terms of his poetic project and how such a blending of science, poetry, and ethical concerns builds on a century of vernacular production before him. Taking the eclipse and the earthquake as natural phenomena that are understood both through the framework of Aristotelian natural philosophy and through religious framing, we will consider how Dante’s move from the natural to the supernatural is one that allows him to insistently focus on questions of justice and access with global implications while continuing the project of radical language creation that translates science for a new readership.