Event

The Center for Italian Studies, the Italian Studies Section of the Department of Romance Languages, and the Kislak Center welcome distinguished historian Carlo Ginzburg (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa) for a series of lectures and conversations. We gratefully acknowledge our Penn partners (Italian at Penn; the Center for Italian Studies; the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies; the Department of History; the Workshop in the History of Material Texts; the Jewish Studies Program Kutchin Seminar Series; and Penn Libraries), and The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University for their assistance.

These events will be held remotely, via Zoom. Link information will be provided to registrants. All events are free and open to the public.

Registration and more information

Among Carlo Ginzburg's many publications are The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1980), The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries (1993), History, Rhetoric, and Proof (1999), Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive (2006).

In this lecture, Professor Ginzburg argues that the double meaning of the word “reproduction”—biological reproduction, on the one hand, replication of objects, on the other—provides a fruitful approach to some of the crucial themes of Dante’s Inferno, as well as to Dante’s reflection on his own work.

Lecture length: approximately 1 hour. To be followed by a question and answer period.