Joseph Luzzi

Joseph Luzzi received his PhD from Yale University. He is the author of six books: Dante’s “Divine Comedy”: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2024); Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance (W. W. Norton, 2022); In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (HarperCollins, 2015), which has been translated into multiple languages; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); and Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale University Press, 2008). He is the translator of a new edition of Dante’s Vita Nuova, published by Liveright in 2024, and the editor of the scholarly anthology Italian Cinema: From the Silent Screen to the Digital Image (Bloomsbury, 2020).   

Among Luzzi’s honors are the 1997 Grandgent Award, bestowed by the Dante Society of America, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars grant, and fellowships from the National Humanities Center and Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. In 2017, he was named Cittadino Onorario [Honorary Citizen] of Acri, Calabria.

Luzzi is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, where he teaches courses on film and Italian studies.