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Barbara Pezzotti

Barbara Pezzotti

Barbara Pezzotti, PhD (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ), is Senior Lecturer in European Languages at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include crime fiction and popular culture, literary geographies and utopian literature. Her latest monograph is Mediterranean Crime Fiction: Transcultural Narratives in and around the ‘Great Sea’ (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She is also a former journalist and still contributes to Il Sole 24 Ore, the leading economic and financial newspaper in Italy. She is a Dante Alighieri enthusiast and teaches Dante and the Divine Comedy in her Italian Studies and European Studies units at Monash University.

Barbara Pezzotti reviews ‘Dante’s Divine Comedy: A biography’ by Joseph Luzzi

May 2025, no. 475 25 April 2025
The Divine Comedy (1308-21) is an iconic narrative poem widely studied in schools and universities all over the world. At a time obsessed with the ‘here and now’, one may wonder, as a student of mine did in their anonymous evaluation of one of my units, why ‘we should still study a poet who died one thousand years ago’. By taking on the job of mapping the reception of the Divine Comedy, Jo ... (read more)