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Beth Coggeshall

Demos Fellow

Assistant Professor of Italian Studies

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 literature. 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 honored to receive a University Teaching Award for undergraduate teaching in 2018-2019, and she is currently part of the inaugural class of faculty fellows of FSU’s Demos Institute for Humanities Data, 2019-2020.

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)

Digital Projects

Selected Publications

  • “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. Forthcoming 2020.
  • “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, pp. 82-98. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2012.
  • “Dante, Islam, and Edward Said.” Telos 139 (Summer 2007): 133-151.

Project Images

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