Teodolinda Barolini is Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia University. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001), the American Philosophical Society (2002), and the Medieval Academy of America (2000).
Professor Barolini is a foreign member of the Accademia Olimpica of Vicenza (2015), and Italy’s National Academy, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (2018).
From 1997 to 2003, Professor Barolini served as fifteenth president of the Dante Society of America.
Teodolinda Barolini received her B.A. in Classics from Sarah Lawrence College in 1972, her M.A. in Italian from Columbia University in 1973, and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1978. She began her career as Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of California at Berkeley in 1978. She subsequently moved to New York University, where she taught from 1983 to 1992. She returned to Columbia University as Chair of the Department of Italian in 1992, serving as Chair from 1992 to 2004 and again from 2011-2014. She was named Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian in 1999.
Barolini’s research focuses on thirteenth- and fourteenth- century Italian literary culture, its relation to classical antiquity, and its reception through the centuries to our own day. She has written widely on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the medieval lyric.
Her books include:
Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the ‘Comedy’. Princeton, 1984. Winner of the Marraro Prize of the Modern Language Association and the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy.
Italian trans. Il miglior fabbro: Dante e i poeti della ‘Commedia’. Bollati Boringhieri, 1993.
The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante, Princeton, 1992.
Italian trans. La Commedia senza Dio: Dante e la creazione di una realtà virtuale. Feltrinelli, 2003
Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, Fordham, 2006. Winner of the Premio Flaiano in italianistica in 2007 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4lfPpRMEj0).
Italian trans. Il secolo di Dante. Bompiani, 2012.
Rime giovanili e della ‘Vita Nuova’ 2009.
Dante’s Lyric Poetry: Lyrics of Youth and of the ‘Vita Nuova’. Expanded and revised edition, with English translations of the poems by Richard Lansing, University of Toronto Press, 2014.
Dante’s Multitudes: History, Philosophy, Method. Notre Dame U. Press, 2022.
Il vento di Aristotele: Saggi danteschi. La Nave di Teseo, 2024.
Professor Barolini is Editor-in-Chief of Digital Dante: https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/, and the author of the Commento Baroliniano, the first digital commentary on the Commedia: https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/
Barolini’s work can be downloaded from academia.edu.
Last updated 01/25
Selected Bibliography