About Giuseppe Mazzotta

Giuseppe Mazzotta is Sterling Professor in the Humanities for Italian at Yale University. Born at Curinga (Catanzaro), Mazzotta has studied in Italy, Canada, and the United States. He received his Ph.D from Cornell University in 1969 and has taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, and Yale University. He is the author of ground-breaking books on Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Vico, and on various literary figures of the Renaissance. In 1979 Princeton University Press published his first book on Dante, Dante Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy. In 1986, Princeton published his The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron. In 1993, two volumes came out: Dante’s Visioon and the his Circle of Knowledge (Princeton,Univ. Press) and The Worlds of Petrarch (Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies), second printing 1999. In 1999 The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton University Press) came out and it was followed the year after by the Italian translation, La nuova mappa del mondo: la filosofia poetica di Giambattista Vico (Einaudi Edit.) In 2001, Mazzotta published a book on the Renaissance theory of “making”, Cosmopoiesis (Univ. of Toronto Press). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and is the current president of the Dante Society of America.