Reading Dante for the Rest of Your Life

Join Professor Randy Boyagoda  (University of Toronto) and Professor Tom Cavanaugh (University of San Francisco) for a daylong seminar on how and why reading Dante can change your life. For this seminar, you will be asked to read Dante’s Inferno in advance. The morning sessions will be devoted to exploring this canticle in the overall context of Dante’s life and work and why it continues to matter today. The afternoon sessions will focus on specific cantos from Purgatorio and Paradiso, which will be read together in seminar. The session will conclude with a dinner and conversation about why and how Dante matters to your reading life, and your reading life to the rest of your life. Specific Dante editions will be provided to seminar participants in advance.

This is an invite-only event.

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he also serves as Vice-Dean, Undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He is the author of six books, including four novels, most recently Dante’s Indiana (2021). He writes essays and reviews for the New York Times, the Atlantic, First Things, and the Financial Times (UK). He lives in Toronto with his wife and four daughters.

Tom Cavanaugh is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco. For his teaching, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded him an Enduring Questions grant. His most recent research concerns medical ethics. Oxford University Press published his Hippocrates’ Oath and Asclepius’ Snake: The Birth of the Medical Profession (New York, 2018). The Clarendon Press of Oxford University published his Double-effect Reasoning: Doing Good and Avoiding Evil (Oxford, 2006).He regularly teaches a course entitled, “Reading Dante with Aristotle and Aquinas.”