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Lorenzo Valterza

Ph.D, Rutgers) Lecturer, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania. I work across a number of disciplines and periods, including: medieval literature (Italian, English, Latin); legal philosophy (medieval and modern); interpretation and hermeneutics from medieval to modern. Most fundamentally, my teaching and research explore how medieval concepts and traditions inform one another across disciplines; similarly, I ask repeatedly how such ideas still speak to our thinking today. Hence, my current work on the overlap between medieval interpretive approaches to poetry and Roman law in Italy and France. Other current projects include a study of the juridical conventions of torture, confession, and fama in the Divine Comedy (Dante Studies, forthcoming), and an essay on the constitutive role of language and dialogue in the communities that comprise that poem. I also write on digital culture, such as how medieval attitudes toward knowledge can help us better understand the figure of the hacker in contemporary popular culture.
 
Recent graduate courses that I have taught include: Literature and the Law (with Michael Gamer); Dante, Love, and the Afterlife. Undergraduate courses that I teach include: Dante; Politics and Literature: Comedy in Civic Discourse; Creative Writing; and various courses on Italian Language and Culture.

Courses Taught

summer 2011

ENGL 495.941 Politics and Literature  

spring 2011

summer 2010

spring 2010

ENGL 566.640 Literature and the Law