Dante Today

digital humanities, digital archive, literature, cultural studies, language

Research Mentor: Prof. Elizabeth Coggeshall, she/her/hers
Department, College, Affiliation: Modern Languages and 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: Yes
Number of Research Assistants: 2
Relevant Majors: 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, Flexible schedule (Combination of business and outside of business. TBD between student and research mentor.)
Roundtable Times and Zoom Link: Not participating in the Roundtable

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 nearly 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.

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.