Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta

Originally from Italy, Giuseppe Mazzotta came to Canada as a child. While he spoke no English at first, through perseverance, hard work and encouragement by his father, he graduated from U of T and went on to complete his PhD at Cornell University. A specialist in medieval literature, he is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Dante. Since 1983, Mazzotta has been teaching at Yale University, where he is Sterling Professor in the Humanities for Italian, the highest academic rank at Yale, and also serves as chair of the department. 

Mazzotta's extensive writings address all periods of Italian literature and culture and includes Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment, which consists of a number of public lectures he delivered in 1999 as the Emilio Goggio Visiting Professor in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto.