Alejandro Cuadrado

Alejandro Cuadrado is a Ph.D. candidate in the Italian Department and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. His dissertation explores how Dante writes a history of religious orders into the Commedia.

Alejandro was born in Guadalajara, Mexico and grew up in a small mountain town in Colorado. In addition to reading in coffee shops, he enjoys skiing and hiking. His interest in Italian began when he lived in Vicenza, Italy for a year in 2010-2011 as a Rotary Youth Exchange Student. In 2016 he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with an A.B. in Italian and Certificates in Medieval Studies and Humanistic Studies. His senior thesis, “The Poetics of Pilgrimage in Dante’s Commedia,” received the Gruppo Esponenti Senior Thesis Prize for the best thesis in Italian as well as the Joseph R. Strayer Prize in Medieval Studies. In 2015 Alejandro was awarded the Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America.

In 2017 Alejandro received an M.A. in Italian from Columbia. His graduate coursework has spanned many disciplines and time periods, and he has presented his research at regional, national, and international conferences and lectures. In 2019 he received an M.Phil. in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia. His research topics for his qualifying exams included Dante and the Church, Petrarch’s relationship with a multicultural Mediterranean, and the history of medieval anti-fraternal satire. In addition to Italian, Alejandro also works with English, Spanish, French, and Latin literature. Forthcoming publications include an article on the contemporary poet Shane McCrae’s use of Dante and a chapter in an MLA volume on supporting dissertation writers through peer-led interdisciplinary writing groups.

Alejandro is a member of the Dante Society of America, the American Boccaccio Association, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Modern Language Association. He has taught Italian language for three years at Columbia and at DePauw University’s summer program in Grado, Italy and taught Literature Humanities at Columbia as a Core Preceptor in 2020-2021. He served two terms as the President of the Arts & Sciences Graduate Council and has worked at GSAS Writing Studio since 2018, where he is a Senior Writing Consultant. Alejandro is a Provost’s Diversity Fellow and a recipient of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life’s Summer Research Fellowship. He is currently teaching Literature Humanities and will defend his dissertation in the spring of 2023.