Italian Research Seminar: Arielle Saiber (Johns Hopkins)

As part of the 2026 Fall Italian Research Seminar series, the Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture by Professor Arielle Saiber (Johns Hopkins University) titled:

Neither Here, Nor There: Directionality in Dante's Paradiso

Upward, downward, inward, outward, backwards, forwards: how do we orient ourselves in an altered state of consciousness, whether that state be a dream, a hallucinated landscape, or a place that purports to be spaceless and timeless, such as the final realm of Dante’s Paradiso? How do proprioception and a sense of directionality function when we are traveling within our own minds, or in a “non-space”? Various disciplinary fields have engaged this question: spaceflight medicine, for example, looks at how astronauts respond to extended periods in zero gravity; clinic trials by psychologists and neuroscientists study visions occasioned by psychedelic substances; videogame designers worry about the nausea-inducing kinesthetic problems people note while in virtual realities. Adopting terminology developed by these and other research areas, this talk will explore the final cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy, where we witness the Pilgrim’s dizzying approach toward, into, around, and with the Divine. 

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. Saiber is Associate Collaborator with The Altered States Archive. The Archive is gathering accounts of altered states of consciousness across cultures and throughout history. It is run by the Yaden Lab.

The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The Seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The Seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.

Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.