The Materiality of Medieval Texts working group, sponsored by the Medieval Institute and convened by Laura Banella, CJ Jones, and Johannes Junge Ruhland, invites you to its first meeting of the year. Please import meeting details to your calendar using this link.   We will discuss "(Un)Illustrating the Lyric: Possibilities of an Intermedial Dante," a pre-circulated chapter from Laura Banella's monograph, Rewriting Dante: Lyric Books and Cultural Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (1290-1550), which is in its final stages of revision. Annie Killian will launch us off into discussion with a response, and we will have ample time to share thoughts and questions on the readings. If you are pressed for time and can only skim through the reading, please do come anyway!  Contact information: jjungeru@nd.eduOriginally published at romancelanguages.nd.edu.

The Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights will host a panel discussion with the Catholic Mobilizing Network on stories of justice from death row. The Catholic Mobilizing Network is a national organization that mobilizes Catholics and all people of good will to value life over death, to end the use of the death penalty, to transform the U.S. criminal legal system from punitive to restorative, and to build capacity in U.S. society to engage in restorative practices. A reception will follow the event in the atrium of the Hesburgh Center for International Studies. PanelistsGary Drinkard spent close to six years on Alabama’s death row for a crime he did not commit — the robbery and murder of a 65-year-old automotive junk dealer in Decatur, Alabama. The case against Drinkard rested primarily on testimony from his half-sister and her common-law husband, both of whom were facing charges for unrelated crimes that would be dismissed in exchange for their testimony against Drinkard. Drinkard reached out to Bryan Stevenson at the Equal Justice Initiative for help with his case. In 2000, the Alabama Supreme Court ordered a new trial because of prosecutorial misconduct, and with the help of the Southern Center for Human Rights, he won an acquittal in 2001.Rev. Dr. Crystal Walker has a Masters of Divinity degree from Payne Theological Seminary and a Doctor of Ministry degree from United Theological Seminary. Her ministry focus is on women who have experienced domestic abuse, rape, and/or incest. She is the founder of Pastors Against Domestic Violence, an ecumenical ministry that trains pastors to be courtroom advocates for victims of domestic violence (women, men, and children). She is also focused on many additional social injustices in the city of Dayton, Ohio. Walker is also a strong advocate against the death penalty and for stricter gun laws. She lost her son, Edward, to gun violence when he was 28 years old. She serves on the board of Journey of Hope – from Violence to Healing and is the co-chair of Ohioans to Stop Executions.Ruth Friedman has dedicated her career to fighting for the rights and lives of men and women sentenced to death, working first on behalf of state-sentenced people in Alabama and Georgia and then for those facing execution in federal courts. She began her capital work at the Southern Center for Human Rights, where she handled direct appeals, habeas proceedings, and trials throughout the South, and later joined the Alabama Capital Representation Resource Center and the Equal Justice Initiative as they transformed capital representation in Alabama. Friedman has testified, trained, and argued in Congress, classrooms, and courts nationwide. In 2023, she received the Southern Center’s Frederick Douglass Award. She earned her J.D. from Yale Law School and her undergraduate degree from Harvard University. Originally published at klau.nd.edu.

Join us for Richard Etlin’s body of work on the Pantheon and his unique view on one of the most important architectural buildings in the history of the world. Etlin is an architectural historian and a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland. Register to attend online here Co-sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies. Originally published at architecture.nd.edu.

Classics in the Browning Directed by Eom Yu-naWith Yoo Hae-jin, Yoon Kye-sang, Jo Hyun-do Not Rated, 135 minutesIn Korean with English subtitles The perfect film to celebrate Hangeul Day. This historical drama with comedic flourishes is set in 1940s Korea during its period of Japanese occupation when the Korean language itself was demoted and outlawed. A chance encounter between the illiterate Pan-soo (Yoo Hae-jin) and a representative of the Korean Language Society (Yoon Kye-sang) brings together an unlikely partnership working to publish a Korean language dictionary in defiance of the law. GET TICKETS *Free for ND, SMC, HC, and IUSB students. **Co-presented by the David A. Heskin and Marilou Brill Endowment for Excellence, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship/Hesburgh Libraries.

The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to inaugurate the sixth edition of the series Tre Corone: testi e contesti dell'Italia medievale (2025–2026) with an event dedicated to the recently published volume Voci sul Purgatorio di Dante. Una nuova lettura della seconda cantica (Carocci, 2024), edited by Zygmunt G. Barański and Maria Antonietta Terzoli. The book brings together canto-by-canto readings of Dante’s Purgatorio, developed through a series of five seminars held between September 2022 and September 2023, co-sponsored by the University of Basel’s Institute of Italian Studies and the William & Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies at the University of Notre Dame. International in scope, Voci sul Purgatorio features contributions from scholars across diverse backgrounds and traditions who, building on the momentum of the Dante centenary, offer a fresh critical reassessment of the Purgatorio and its central themes. In addition to the canto readings, the volume includes essays on the structure and models of the Purgatorio ; its language and style between memory and modernity; the theme of love; the pastoral tradition; and issues of biography and textual transmission. On this occasion, the editors will be joined in conversation by Alberto Casadei (University of Pisa) and Mira Veronica Mocan (University of Roma Tre). Register hereZygmunt G. Barański is the Emeritus R. L. Canala Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame and the Serena Professor of Italian Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of numerous studies on Dante’s works and their reception, on medieval Italian literary tradition with particular focus on authors such as Cavalcanti, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as on modern Italian literature, culture, and cinema, with many essays devoted to Pasolini. His books include: The New Italian Novel (with Lino Pertile, 1993); “Libri poetarum in quattuor species dividuntur”: Essays on Dante and ‘Genre’ (1995); “Luce nuova, sole nuovo”: Saggi sul rinnovamento culturale in Dante (1996); The “Fiore” in Context: Dante, France, Tuscany (with Patrick Boyde, 1997); Pasolini Old and New: Surveys and Studies (1999); Dante e i segni: Saggi per una storia intellettuale di Dante (2000); “Chiosar con altro testo”: Leggere Dante nel Trecento (2001; winner of the Valle dei Trulli Prize for Literary Criticism); The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture (with Rebecca West, 2001); Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition (with Theodore J. Cachey Jr., 2009); Dante in Context (with Lino Pertile, 2015); The Cambridge Companion to Dante’s “Commedia” (with Simon Gilson, 2019); Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Literature, Doctrine, Reality (2020); and Voci sull’Inferno di Dante (with M. A. Terzoli, Rome, 2021). Maria Antonietta Terzoli is professor emerita at the University of Basel and the author of numerous studies on Italian literature from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. Her publications include: Il libro di Jacopo (1988); La casa della “Cognizione” (1993 and 2005); Foscolo (2000, 2008, 2010, and 2016); Le lingue di Gadda (1995); I margini del libro (2004); Le prime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (2004); Piccolomini und Basel (2005); Piccolomini: uomo di lettere (2006); Un archivio italiano (2006, with G. Giovannetti); Con l’incantesimo della parola (2007); Alle sponde del tempo consunto (2009); Letteratura e filologia fra Svizzera e Italia (2010, with A. Asor Rosa and G. Inglese); Nell’atelier dello scrittore (2010); Un meraviglioso ordegno (2013, with C. Veronese and V. Vitale); L’italiano in Svizzera (2014, with C. A. Di Bisceglia); William Blake. I disegni per la “Divina Commedia” (2014, with S. Schütze); L’italiano sulla frontiera (2015, with R. Ratti); Commento a “Quer Pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana” di C. E. Gadda (2015 and 2016, with the collaboration of V. Vitale); Gadda: guida al “Pasticciaccio” (2016, 2017, and 2018); Dante und die bildenden Künste (2016, with S. Schütze); Invenzione del moderno (2017); William Blake. La “Divina Commedia” di Dante (2017, with S. Schütze); Inchiesta sul testo (2018); Tasso und die bildenden Künste (2018, with S. Schütze); I “Trionfi” di Petrarca (2020, with M. M. S. Barbero); Saba, Ungaretti e altro Novecento (2021); Petrarca und die bildenden Künste (2021, with S. Schütze); and Voci sull’Inferno di Dante (Rome, 2021, with Z. G. Barański). Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.

Amit Prasad is an associate professor in the School of History & Sociology at Georgia Institute of Technology. He specializes in global, transnational, and postcolonial sociology and history of science, technology, and medicine. His research focuses on the history of the present — in particular, how history of colonialism continues to impact present day norms, values, and practices. His goal has been to excavate the complex and often contradictory entanglements of colonial tropes, ideologies, etc. with emergent knowledges and practices of science, technology, and medicine. Prasad also explores the visual culture of medicine, in particular its shift with the emergence of technologies such as MRI, issues of priority and invention, and scientific misinformation . He has also published on biopolitics of overseas drug trials and medical transcription and engaged with the role of history of science in films. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, American Institute of Indian Studies, among others and he has published in a number of journals, including Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology & Human Values, Theory, Culture, and Society, Cultural Geographies, Technology & Culture. His first book, Imperial Technoscience: Entangled Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT Press, 2014), through a study of connected histories of MRI in the US, the UK, and India, investigated how the invention, industrial production, as well as cultures of MRI were entangled within colonial, West-centric, and Orientalist discourses. His second book, Science Studies Meets Colonialism (Polity, 2022), investigates how colonial tropes, norms, ideologies, etc. continue to animate the present, including in the fields of history of science and science and technology studies (STS). Drawing on an ethnographic study of a stem cell clinic, he is writing his third book that is tentatively titled Miracle or Science: Scientific Uncertainty, Contested Ethics, and Global Melange in a Stem Cell Laboratory. He is an editor of the journal Science, Technology and Society (Sage). He is also an avid collector of Indian art - medieval miniatures and modern and contemporary paintings and etchings. He is particularly interested in postcolonial cosmopolitanism of Indian art/artists. Prasad's lecture is sponsored by the Liu Institute's South Asia Group and Health, Humanities and Society, Reilly Center for Science Technology and Values.Lunch Provided — Please Bring Beverages In support of the Liu Institute’s growing commitment to sustainability, we will no longer be offering drinks at our public lectures and panels. We encourage audience members to bring their water bottles or to drink from nearby water fountains.   Originally published at asia.nd.edu.