Piero Boitani

Who is Piero Boitani?

Piero Boitani is an Italian literary critic. Born in Rome in 1947, he received his Ph.D. from Cambridge while teaching there and has taught in the Universities of Pescara and Perugia. He is Professor of Comparative Literature at the "Sapienza" University of Rome and teaches at the Universities of Notre Dame and of Italian Switzerland.

President of the European Society for English Studies 1989-95, Fellow of the British Academy, the Academia Europaea, the Polish Academy of Arts, the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, the Accademia dell’Arcadia, the Medieval Academy of America, the Dante Society of America, in 2002 he has received from the Accademia dei Lincei the Feltrinelli Prize for Literary Criticism, Italy’s most distinguished literary award. He is the Literary Editor of the Greek and Latin classics series, Fondazione Valla.

Medievalist, Dante scholar, comparatist, interested in ancient myth as well as modern literatures, Boitani has published, amongst others, the following volumes: Prosatori Negri Americani del Novecento; Chaucer and Boccaccio; English Medieval Narrative of the 13th and 14th centuries; Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame; The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature; La letteratura del Medioevo inglese; The Shadow of Ulysses. Figures of a Myth; Sulle orme di Ulisse; The Bible and its Rewritings; The Genius to Improve an Invention; Winged Words. Flight in Poetry and History; Esodi e Odissee; Dante’s Poetry of the Donati; La prima lezione sulla letteratura, Letteratura europea e Medioevo volgare.