Dante and Italian Unification

A lecture by
Mahnaz Yousefzadeh, NYU

This lecture will address the particular role the figure of Dante played in the process of national unification of Italy by discussing the relevance of this history for the contemporary moment, as neighborhoods, cities and nations are pondering how to enter a global economy and society without losing cultural genes and artistic heritage.

Mahnaz Yousefzadeh is a historian of Modern Italy and Early Modern Mediterranean. She is the author of City and Nation in Italian Unification (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and Florence’s Embassy to Sultan of Egypt (Palgrave, 2018), as well as articles on the relation of Italy and Persia in the Early Modern Period, and aesthetics and politics in European nation-building. Her current projects—one academic and the other a creative non-fiction—trace encounters between traditions through the movement of people, artifacts, and images. Her scholarly book project examines Florence’s relation to Persia in the 16th-century. Mahnaz’s creative non-fiction is similarly concerned with recovering ethical voices and meanings by revisiting as translator, mediator, and the traveler, her migration from and return to Iran after decades of living in the west. 

In ENGLISH.

Organized by Prof. Alison Cornish, “Dante and…” is a series of lectures that focus on Dante’s relevance in today’s world. These lectures feature scholars and experts from many different fields of interest, invited to present their unique readings of the poet’s works.