Each academic year, the Ferrucci Institute offers a series of talks featuring scholars from both within and outside of Chapman University who are advancing the field by exploring Italy’s more universal educational and intellectual potentials, both in its peninsular and diasporic contexts. The series takes place in Argyros Forum 201 (Orange campus) on two Wednesday evenings in fall and two evenings in spring. All students, faculty, and staff working on Italy-related projects are encouraged to attend. The event is open to the public.
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
7–8:30 p.m.
Argyros Forum 201
“Muses in Heaven, Muses on Earth: Epic Poetry and the Arts in Renaissance Italy”
Dr. Corrado Confalonieri (Bernardino Telesio Professor, Ferrucci Institute)
Introductory remarks: Dr. Federico Pacchioni (Ferrucci Director), Dr. John Boitano (Chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures)
What do a 16th-century knight on a quest, a fantastical island, and a centuries-old poem have to do with painting, music, and even architecture? This talk invites you to rediscover Italian Renaissance epic poetry not as a closed-in and rigid genre, but as a dynamic and expansive one—capable of absorbing, reconfiguring, and dialoguing with other literary forms, styles, and thematic concerns, while also extending beyond the boundaries of literature into the broader realm of the arts. Focusing on key examples from the Italian Renaissance epic—particularly the works of Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) and Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), along with responses from some of their early readers—this presentation argues that epic poetry has historically functioned as a crossroads for artistic expression. This is evident in several ways: the interdisciplinary theories underpinning epic composition; the frequent representation of visual and performative arts within the texts themselves; the interpretive demands that require engagement with artistic traditions; and the epics’ capacity to inspire tangible works of art and architecture. Ultimately, this talk positions the epic not only as a literary form but as a cultural engine that catalyzes artistic production across media—making it an ideal case study for students and scholars across disciplines today.
Corrado Confalonieri is the first holder of the Bernardino Telesio Endowed Professorship in Italian Studies at Chapman University. He holds two doctoral degrees, a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures (Harvard University, 2019) and a dottorato in Italian Literature and History of Italian Language (University of Padua, 2014). He taught and did research both in Italy and in the United States, working as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Wesleyan University (2019-2020), as the Lauro de Bosis Fellow in Italian Studies at Harvard University (2020-2021), and as an Assistant Professor at the University of Parma (2021-2024). His publications include three monographs (most recently Torquato Tasso e il desiderio di unità. La "Gerusalemme liberata"e una nuova teoria dell'epica, Rome, Carocci, 2022, and "Queste spaziose loggie". Architettura e poetica nella tragedia italiana del Cinquecento, Naples, Loffredo, 2022) and more than thirty articles on topics spanning from the Renaissance to 20th century Italian literature. He has edited an anthology of Boiardo’s works (Boiardo, Unicopli, 2018, with J. A. Cavallo), a multidisciplinary book on teaching (Il mestiere d'insegnante, Unicopli, 2013, with A. Musetti), and, together with Nicola Catelli, he is the Co-Editor-in-chief of Parole rubate. Rivista internazionale di studi sulla citazione/Purloined Letters. An international journal of quotation studies. He collaborated with Jeffrey Schnapp for FuturPiaggio: Six Italian Lessons on Mobility and Modern Life and translated the book into Italian (2017). His translations also include the Italian edition of The World Beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto by J.A. Cavallo (2017).
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
7–8:30 p.m.
Argyros Forum 201
“Sailing toward a Mediterranean Citizenship. Dante, Littoral Poet of the Archipelago
of Exile — from Florence to the Tout-Monde of Pietramala”
Dr. Roberta Morosini (UCLA)
Introductory remarks: Dr. Federico Pacchioni (Ferrucci Director), Professor Corrado
Confalonieri (Ferrucci Institute)
This talk offers an exploration of the relationship between water, including rivers, and Dante’s experience as an exile, observing how the pilgrim’s condition of estrangement ultimately places the poet outside Florence but within the world to which he claims to belong, “like a fish to water” (DVE I VI 3). Adapting the archipelagic thought of Édouard Glissant and Derek Walcott into a cartographic key, the discussion begins with cantos IX and XXVII of Paradiso to retrace the stages of a navigation that extends from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean (where Europa is abducted by Jupiter in the form of a bull), through the “passage” crossed by Ulysses, to the island of Purgatory and the western ocean. This journey sketches out the map of an open, porous, archipelagic Mediterranean. The aim is to explore how forced mobility led Dante to privilege crossings within and across the Mediterranean, within a plurilingual and mobile geography. From this perspective — which rethinks Europe from the point of view of water — traditional geocultural notions of center and periphery are displaced, and spaces of otherness redefined. What emerges is a Mediterranean of porous and shifting borders, a true archipelago, at the center of which stands Crete — the common nation, as Boccaccio, commentator of the Inferno, had intuited. Like in La via dell’esodo (2008) by Cameroonian artist Barthélémy Toguo, Dante recognizes perpetual departure as a human condition and constructs the sea as the space of modernity and European identity. Displaced and excluded from his community, Dante responds to exile by drawing the boundaries of a collective community he imagines as his own: from Florence to a civitas amplissima, the Tout-Monde of Glissant, Dante’s Pietramala — a nation of water that the poet elects as his place of belonging, in a peregrination — a navigation — toward a Mediterranean citizenship that transcends what Egidio Ivetic calls the “global frontier,” and offers a model for an increasingly closed and inhospitable Europe.
Roberta Morosini is Full Professor at UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies. Previously, she held posts at the Università L’Orientale di Napoli and Wake Forest University and was the Charles Speroni Endowed Chair in Italian Studies at UCLA and Chair of Italian Culture at UC Berkeley. She has a Ph.D. from McGill University in Italian Literature, with a specialization in Italian Medieval Literature and Culture. She also has an Italian Laurea in European Languages and Literatures from the University “Federico II” of Naples and a French D.E.A. (Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies) in Littératures françaises from the Université de Rennes II, as well as a Diploma from the School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University. She has studied Dante and linguistics at the University of Reading, UK. A recipient of the Luigi De Lise Culture Award, Dr. Morosini has been a Fellow at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa i Tatti, at the NEH Mediterranean Summer Institute, at the Bogliasco Foundation, and at the Cini Foundation’s Centro Studi di Civiltà Italiana Vittore Branca. She has served twice as Vice President of the American Boccaccio Association and once as President of the executive committee of the Division of Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature of the MLA. She is currently on the advisory boards of “Ente Nazionale Giovanni Boccaccio” and the Mediterranean Seminar.org. As in an interview for UCLA CMRS CENTER for Early Global (Studies Roberta Morosini appointed as Professor of European languages and transcultural studies – UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies,) Dr. Morosini’s research interests lie in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Culture and Literature in a pan-Mediterranean perspective, with a sea level approach and a strong belief in the Archipelagic thought, for a geo-philology of the sea. These interests include studies of the Mediterranean, metaliterary and geocritical studies, and spatial and cartographic writings from Dante to Renaissance island books. Part of her pan-Mediterranean research evolves around the study of Christian-Muslim Relations and mis-representations of Muhammad the Prophet of Islam as in her forthcoming book Boccaccio and the Invention of Islam. Writing Otherness and Crossing Faiths in the Mediterranean (De Gruyter).
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
7–8:30 p.m.
Argyros Forum 201
“Italy and the Invention of Modern Opera”
Dr. Giulio Ongaro (Ferrucci Fellow)
Introductory remarks: Dr. Federico Pacchioni (Ferrucci Director), Dr. Louise Thomas
(Ferrucci Institute)
Opera has been closely identified with Italian culture for centuries, and it has provided us with moments of intense emotion and beautiful music. This has been true since October 6th, 1600, the date of the performance of the first surviving opera in Florence. However, we could argue that the widespread success of the genre and even its development in Italy were not foregone conclusions and that several factors had to come together to create the soil in which opera could become the phenomenon it has been ever since. I would like to illustrate the various aspects of the cultural, artistic, and political context of Italy that contributed to the development of opera. Debates regarding the proper type of singing, the role and power of music, the proper behavior of a gentleman, the fashion for classical theatre, and the competition among the various courts of Italy in the 16th century all had a role in leading to the first works that can be truly called operas. On the other hand, momentous as the year 1600 is in the history of opera, we really cannot be sure that operas as performed in the first decade of the 17th century could appeal to a public outside the court and could therefore establish a wider appeal. In fact, very early in the history of opera, even some of its composers show doubts about the viability of its musical style, describing parts of the opera as “boring.” I will show that the further development of opera and its success are dependent on exciting changes that occurred shortly after its introduction, in the first few decades of the 17th century, when opera gained a greater range of musical solutions, and a much deeper, surprisingly modern, psychological depth. In addition, in those decades, opera was opened to the paying public when the first public theatre for opera was opened in Venice, a development which introduced a new set of challenges and opportunities. I will show how the Venetian context, and the presence in that city of first-rate composers like Claudio Monteverdi, changed the genre deeply, and made it possible for opera to endure and to achieve its remarkable success.
Giulio Ongaro, a native of Venice, Italy, began his college studies at the Università degli Studi di Venezia, majoring in business. After his military service, he moved to the United States, where he received a B.M. degree in flute performance from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a dissertation on music at the Venetian church of St. Mark’s in the 16th century. His research is particularly centered on questions such as the mutual influence of society and the arts, the social and political context for the production and performance of music, the business of music in Early Modern Europe, music printing, musical instruments in the 16th century, and the relationship of words and music. He has published on these topics in scholarly journals in the US and in Europe, and he is the author or co-author of nine articles in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the standard reference work in music. For his research he has received grants from the Martha B. Rockefeller Fund for Music, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, among others. He taught music history and musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of Delaware, before moving to California in 1991 to take a position on the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. He remained at USC from 1991 to 2009, serving also as Chair of the Department of Musicology, and later as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs for the Thornton School. From 2009 to 2015 he was Dean of the Conservatory and Professor of Music at the University of the Pacific, Stockton, California, where he also supervised the Brubeck Institute. He served as Dean of the College of Performing Arts and the Bertea Family Chair in Music at Chapman University until 2024.
Wednesday, April 1, 2026
7–8:30 p.m.
Argyros Forum 201
“Quieting the Human in Premodern Italy”
Dr. Arielle Saiber (John Hopkins University)
Introductory remarks: Dr. Federico Pacchioni (Ferrucci Director), Professor Corrado
Confalonieri (Ferrucci Institute)
We can barely imagine what it is really like to be another person, much less a beloved pet. How can we even begin to know what it is like to be a coastline, a tree, or a chair? How did thinkers in Renaissance Italy, famed for celebrating the dignity of the human, and even Dante before them, imagine the essence of the nonhuman? How did they write about nonhuman entities from flora to fauna, architecture to automata, demons to angels? It turns out that many Renaissance luminaries, such as Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, along with Dante, had a great deal more empathy and love for the nonhuman than has been attributed to them. This talk looks at how “textual nonhumans”—the ones written onto a page—are fascinating expressions of hybridity and compassion and make us rethink our definitions of both Renaissance humanism and a canonical author of the late Middle Ages.
Arielle Saiber is Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Saiber's books include Images of Quattrocento Florence: Writings on Literature, History and Art co-edited with Stefano U. Baldassarri (Yale, 2000); Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language (Ashgate/Routledge, 2005); and Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2017). Saiber publishes primarily on Dante, on the intersections between premodern Italian literature and mathematics/science, and visual interpretations of Dante’s Commedia. She has also published on early print history, science fiction, and experimental electronic music. Her current research is on “altered states of consciousness” in medieval and Renaissance Italian literature. She has co-edited a number of special issues of academic journals: for Configurations, “Mathematics and the Imagination” (2009) with Henry S. Turner; for Dante Studies, “Longfellow and Dante” (2010) with Giuseppe Mazzotta; for California Italian Studies, “Sound” (2014) with Deanna Shemek; and for Science Fiction Studies, “Italian Science Fiction” (2015) with Salvatore Proietti and Umberto Rossi. She is currently co-editing with Proietti an anthology of Italian science fiction in English for Wesleyan University Press's Early Classics of Science Fiction series. Her doctoral dissertation on Giordano Bruno won Yale’s Field Prize (2000), and in 2004 she received the Karofsky Prize for teaching at Bowdoin. She has been a fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples, Italy (1998-1999), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2003-2004), and Villa I Tatti - Harvard’s Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy (2008-2009). She also received an NEH Fellowship (2008-2009), the MLA's Scaglione Publication Award (2016), the Newberry Library's Weiss-Brown Publication Award (2017), the American Initiative for Italian Culture's Bridge Book Award (2018), and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts' Kendrick Book Prize (2019) for her book Measured Words. In 2006 she built the web-based archive, Dante Today: Sightings and Citings of Dante’s Work in Contemporary Culture, which she now co-edits with Beth Coggeshall. She co-edits the new book series Proximities: Experiments in Nearness with David Cecchetto for the University of Minnesota Press.
Windows to Italy Series 2025-2026!
