Beth Coggeshall
Contact Information
W 11:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Italian
Faculty Adviser, Italian Club
Faculty Adviser, Gamma Kappa Alpha Honor Society
Coordinator, Medieval Studies Workshop
Beth Coggeshall (PhD, Stanford University) specializes in the literature and culture of medieval Italy, with a particular focus on Dante. Her research centers on the intersections of literature, ethics, and cultural identity; medievalism and popular culture; and the transmedia reception of Dante’s works. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the disputes over the role of friendship in medieval Italian literary culture. She is also the co-editor (with Arielle Saiber, Bowdoin College) of the website Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture, a curated, crowd-sourced digital archive that showcases Dante’s sustained presence in contemporary culture. She was part of the inaugural class of faculty fellows in FSU’s Demos Institute for Data Humanities, 2019-2020. She was honored to receive a University Teaching Award for undergraduate teaching in 2019 and the Undergraduate Research Mentor Award in 2020.
Research Interests
13th and 14th Century Italian Literature, History, and Culture
The tre corone (Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch)
Reception Studies
Digital Humanities
Courses Taught
Dante’s Inferno (Ethics; in English)
La Commedia di Dante (in Italian)
Trecento Writers (in Italian)
Survey of Italian Literature, from the Origins to the 18th Century (in Italian)
Advanced Grammar and Composition (in Italian)
Selected Publications
Research
- “Jousting with Verse: The Poetics of Friendship in Duecento Comuni.” Italian Culture. Forthcoming 2021.
- “Dante Today: Tracking the Global Resonance of the Commedia.” In Dante Beyond Borders. Oxford: Legenda. Forthcoming 2021.
- “Dante oggi. L’Inferno diffondibile.” Italianistica. Forthcoming 2020.
- “Dante’s Afterlife in Popular Culture.” In Approaches to Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy, 2nd edition. Eds. Christopher Kleinhenz and Kristina Olson. MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series, New York: Modern Language Association, 2020. Pp. 185-191.
- “Dealing with Dante’s Audacity: Borges’s ‘Aleph’ and the Mystical Imperative.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 24.2 (Fall 2017): 103-114.
- “Per lo ’nferno tuo nome si spande: Politics in the Infernal City.” In Critical Insights: The Inferno, by Dante. Ed. Patrick Hunt. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2012. Pp. 82-98.
- “Dante, Islam, and Edward Said.” Telos 139 (Summer 2007): 133-151.
Public Writing and Media
- “Purgatorio 16: The Poem’s Moral Center.” Podcast with Deborah Parker (University of Virginia). Canto per Canto: Conversations with Dante in Our Time. Dante Society of America.
- “Bad Apples and Sour Trees: Dante on Systemic Injustice, Rage, and Reform.” The Sundial (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies): September 15, 2020.
- “Dante Today.” Podcast with Matthew Treherne (University of Leeds) and Arielle Saiber (Bowdoin College). Leeds Dante Podcast. Centre for Dante Studies, University of Leeds (UK).