Italian Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill

Dino S. Cervigni

Dino CervigniProfessor of Italian
At UNC since 1989

Ph.D. Indiana U, 1975
M.A. Indiana U, 1973
M.Ed. U of Louisville, 1971

Contact Information

Telephone: 919-962-1470
Email: cervigni@unc.edu
Mailing Address: 141 Dey Hall, CB# 3170
Dept of Romance Languages & Literatures
UNC-Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3170

For course syllabi,readings and bibliographies: Courses

Areas of Research

  • Medieval Literature
  • Renaissance Literature
  • Autobiography and mystical writings
  • Theory and Film

Synopsis

Dino S. Cervigni, Professor of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature, was educated in Italy and the United States. He taught at the University of Notre Dame before coming to UNC in 1989.

His main interests focus on the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He offers courses on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, lyric poetry, epic, and autobiography.

He has written on autobiography (The “Vita” of Benvenuto Cellini: Literary Tradition and Genre. Ravenna: Longo, 1979) and on Dante (Dante’s Poetry of Dreams. Firenze: Olschki, 1986; Vita nuova with Facing English Translation. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1995). He is currently completing a three-volume project on Dante: a new bilingual edition, a textual concordance, and a commentary on the Vita nuova.

As founder and editor of the annual monograph Annali d’italianistica, he has thus far edited twenty-one volumes that range from the epic (1983; 1994), Dante and Modern American Criticism (1990), and Guicciardini (1984), to the autobiography (1986), Goldoni (1993), women's voices in Italian literature (1989), Manzoni (1985), D’Annunzio (1987), narrative beginnings and endings (2000), the modern and the postmodern (1991), Italian women mystics (1994), and exile (2002). An NEH fellowship recipient, he has been the president of the American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS) for two terms.

In 2004 he organized an international symposium to celebrate Francis Petrarch's seventh centenary of his birth. The best essays presented at the symposium have appeared in the 2000 issue of Annali d’italianistica.

Current Projects

Professor Cervigni is currently working on serveral projects, including: Dante and the Logos: The Rhetorics of Words, Names, and Silence in Dante's Comedy, and Temporality, Narrativity, and the Human World in Dante’s Vita nuova.

Italian Studies
CB 3170, Dey Hall
UNC-Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3170
(919) 999-9999
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