UROP Project

humanities; literature; digital humanities; popular culture; cultural studies

Research Mentor: ecoggeshall@fsu.edu Elizabeth Coggeshall, she/her/hers
Department, College, Affiliation: Modern Languages & Linguistics, Arts and Sciences
Contact Email: ecoggeshall@fsu.edu
Research Assistant Supervisor (if different from mentor):
Research Assistant Supervisor Email:
Faculty Collaborators:
Faculty Collaborators Email:

Looking for Research Assistants: No
Number of Research Assistants: 5
Relevant Majors: Open to all majors. Preference given to students with interests in the following disciplines: Art, Art History, Classics, Communications, Computer Science, Design, English (lit, creative writing, or EWM), History, Modern Languages and Linguistics, Philosophy, Religion.
Project Location: On FSU Main Campus
Research Assistant Transportation Required:
Remote or In-person: Partially Remote
Approximate Weekly Hours: 7,
Roundtable Times and Zoom Link: Wednesday, September 4, 12-12:30pm
Friday, September 6, 11-11:30am
Friday, September 6, 11:30am-12pm

https://fsu.zoom.us/j/91843067770

Project Description

Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture is a crowd-sourced and curated digital archive that catalogs references to Dante’s Inferno (and other works) in contemporary visual and verbal culture, of the twentieth century and beyond. We have posted more than 2000 “sightings” and “citings” of Dante’s works, and each week we receive new submissions to post, sent to us by readers from around the world. The editors (that means you!) describe, tag, and organize the contributions into general categories (Consumer Goods, Digital Media, Dining & Leisure, Music, Performing Arts, Places, Visual Art and Architecture, Written Word, and Odds & Ends), but we leave to our readers the opportunity to judge the nature and depth of each reference, to classify the references according to their own ways of reading, and to note the frequency of certain themes over others. The goals are twofold: 1) to provide a central access point for these references; and 2) to offer data that students and scholars of Dante can use to think about the “afterlife” of Dante’s works in relation to reception theory, media studies, and cultural studies.

Research Tasks: The project is an ongoing collaboration between faculty and students at FSU and at Johns Hopkins University. Although the research assistants will work independently, they will also correspond regularly with the whole research team. We will all work together to catalog and write posts for new submissions to the site; to systematize the current categories and tags; to add to the growing bibliography on the site; and to research additional contributions to be posted. Depending on the students’ interests, qualifications, and time, research assistants may have the opportunity to provide input on the design and functionality of the site, to create publicity materials for various social media platforms, and/or to contribute original research on the archive’s holdings. Knowledge of Italian is not a requirement, but knowledge of Romance languages and cultures (especially Italian), familiarity with the Wordpress platform, and/or good design sense would be very welcome.
2024-25 is an especially exciting time to get involved with Dante Today! We are in the process of a large-scale migration of the project to a brand-new, bespoke platform designed by the creative team at a web design firm. In 2024-25, UROP students will assist with the migration, reposting our older materials, adding new ones, and testing the site for usability and functionality. Students might also be invited to accompany the faculty mentor in presentations of research and/or to pursue research projects of their own related to the new site.

Skills that research assistant(s) may need: Required: listening; incorporating feedback; working independently; expressing curiosity; English-language writing.

Recommended: writing skills in a language other than English; design skills; previous experience with Wordpress and other digital publishing platforms.

Students need not be language/literature/humanities majors to apply for this position: it is more important that researchers have an interest in or curiosity about the visual and verbal cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries. All students in the arts and sciences are welcome to apply.