“Dante Memes” with Elizabeth Coggeshall, FSU

Please join us  for a talk (presented via Zoom) on Monday April 18 at 12:45 p.m. given by Elizabeth Coggeshall of Florida State University, entitled: “Dante Memes.”

Abstract

In this talk, I will present my work building and maintaining the Dante Today archive, and I’ll show how the archive fuels my research on Dante’s resonance in contemporary popular culture. My talk will have two parts: first I will walk the audience through the site, its history and its design. In the second part of the talk I will present a case study that comes out of my research into what I call “Dante memes.” We will look at how certain catchphrases, figures, and systems that emerge out of Dante’s poem have become fixtures in the American cultural imaginary. I’ll demonstrate how these memes get picked up by artists, writers, advertisers, and content creators who then adapt and/or remix them to critique the contemporary world.

Please feel free to forward this to colleagues and students.

For more information, please contact aleone@syr.edu.