Dr Diana Modesto

BA, MLitt NE MA PhD
Lecturer
Room 720, McCallum/Brennan Building (A18)

+61 2 9351 3876

Diana Modesto is a specialist in Dante Studies, with long experience also as a language teacher (beginners and advanced) and teacher of translation. She worked as a translator and court interpreter until 1975. As the recipient of a small ARC grant in 1998, she and Dr Dugald McLellan, produced a new edition of Landino's commentary on Dante's Inferno which was published by Robert Hollander on his Princeton Dante Database. She is also working on a book, Moving forwards, looking back: Virgil's role in the Divine Comedy.

She received an ARC Large Grant (2000-2002) to work with an Australian team on the development of an electronic transcription and collation of the earliest manuscript tradition of the Commedia as identified by Federico Sanguineti in his new edition of the Commedia, Dantis Alagherii Comedia (Edizione Galluzzo: SISMEL, 2001). The project is to be published in conjunction with the prestigious Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

From 1984 to 1999, together with Mary Dwyer of the University of New England, she was the organiser of the Dante Colloquia which provides a regular forum for papers on Dante by students and staff from all the major Australian universities. The papers of the final nine Colloquia were published as Dante Colloquia in Australia (1982-1999), ed. Margaret Baker and Diana Glenn (Adelaide: Australian Humanities Press, 2000).

She regularly presents papers on Dante at conferences.

Research areas

• Dante's Divine Comedy

Selected publications

Book Chapters

• "The Rainbow and the Griffin", Dante Colloquia in Australia (1982-1999), ed. M. Baker and D. Glenn, Adelaide, Australian Humanities Press, 2000, pp.103-123.

Articles

• "Virgil, Man or Shade? The 'mancato abbraccio' of Purgatorio XXI.132", Spunti e Ricerche, 2 (1995), 3-16.
• "Moments in the Italian Risorgimento", Annali d'Italianistica, 14 (1996), 437-51.
• "Son sans lumière: An investigation into Dante's Nembrot of Inferno XXXI", Altro Polo, 1996, 38-52.
• Review of Julia Bolton Holloway, Twice-told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, New York, 1993, in Parergon, January 1995, 182-85.
• " '[S]ì che la classe correrà diretta/e vero frutto verrà dopo il fiore. (Par. XXVII, 147-148)", The Papers of the Dante Conferences, ed, M. Baker, F. Coassin and D. Glenn, forthcoming.

Other

• Purgatorio: The Divine Comedy with English Commentary, a set of 33 x 45 minute tapes of the Italian text with English commentary, made for the Language Centre, University of Sydney, 1995.