Translation and Genealogy: Latin and the Italian Vernacular in Petrarch’s Rewriting of Dante

Tuesday, Nov.  8, 2005 @ 7:30 p.m.
Bucknell Hall

Kevin Brownlee
Professor of Romance Languages
University of Pennsylvania

Kevin Brownlee is professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and pedagogic interests range in French and Italian from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. He is the author of Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut, and his co-edited volumes include: The New Medievalism and Rethinking the “Romance of the Rose”:Text, Image, Reception (with Sylvia Huot); Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe (with Valeria Finucci); Images of Power: Medieval History/ Discourse/ Literature (Yale French Studies). Among his articles are: “The Conflicted Genealogy of Cultural Authority: Italian Responses to French Cultural Dominance in Il Tesoretto, Il Fiore, and La Commedia”; “Dante, Beatrice, and the Two Departures from Dido”; “Why the Angels Speak Italian: Dante as Vernacular Poet in Paradiso XXV”; and “Christine de Pizan: Gender and the New Vernacular Canon.”