Two noted professors are appointed to endowed professorships

The Yale Corporation recently elected two faculty members to endowed posts. Giuseppe F. Mazzotta was designated the Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Italian Language and Literature. David L. Quint was appointed the George M. Bodman Professor of English and Comparative Literature.

Giuseppe F. Mazzotta centers his work on Italian literature from the Medieval and Renaissance periods to Vico, with a particular focus on Dante. He served at Yale as assistant professor in the department of Romance languages 1970-72 and returned to the University in 1983 as professor of Italian. During the interim he taught at Cornell University and the University of Toronto. Professor Mazzotta is the author of major works in his field, including books on Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. Among them are “The Worlds of Petrarch,” “Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy,” and “Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge,” which was selected as one of the Outstanding Academic Books of 1993 by the journal Choice. Among Professor Mazzotta’s current projects is a forthcoming book on Vico.

Professor Mazzotta is a member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. In1993 he was elected to Honorary Membership, Socio Onorario, of the XVI century Accademia Cosentina, Italy. He serves on the advisory board of the “Italian Perspectives” series edited for University Texts, England, and on the executive committee of the Medieval Academy of America. He also has served on the editorial boards of Yale Italian Studies, Forum Italicum, Documents of the Renaissance, and New Vico Studies, among others, and he is a member of the board of directors of Institute for Vico Studies, Emory University.

David Louis Quint, a specialist in the literature of the European Renaissance, received his bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1971 and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University in 1976. He returned to Yale as professor of comparative literature and English in 1991, after serving 15 years on the Princeton University faculty.

Professor Quint has authored scores of books, articles and reviews. Among them are “The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano,” “Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source,” and “Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton.” He is developing a series of essays on “Don Quijote” and is researching a book on aristocracy and aristocratic identity in European culture in the 16th and 17th centuries. The work examines the dynamics taking place “as a culture of feudal honor faced the emergence of a new culture of the court,” says Professor Quint, “and as these two cultures found representation in literature. The book will look at duelling, hunting, gambling, living on credit, the nobleman and the city, aristocrats and lovemaking.

Professor Quint has been honored with a Danforth Graduate Fellowship, a Fulbright-Hays Travelling Fellowship to Italy, a Fellowship to the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, and National Endowment for the Humanities grants. He received the William Nelson Prize from Renaissance Quarterly. He is on the editorial boards of the journals Comparative Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, I Tatti Studies, and Morgana.