portrait

Guy Raffa has taught at the University of Texas at Austin since 1991. He holds a B.S. in mathematics and computer science from Duke University and a Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Indiana University. His primary scholarly field is medieval Italian literature--Dante above all--with a secondary interest in modern Italian authors, particularly Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco. In addition to articles, book-essays, and reviews, he has published three books: Divine Dialectic: Dante's Incarnational Poetry (Toronto, 2000), Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the "Inferno" (Chicago, 2007), and The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the "Divine Comedy" (Chicago, 2009). For work-in-progress on Dante's graveyard history, he won a Humanities Research Award from the University of Texas and research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His award-winning Danteworlds project takes visitors on a multimedia journey through Dante's Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Featured in the Los Angeles Times and the New Yorker, the website was selected by the NEH as "one of the best online resources for education in the humanities." As seen in this public lecture and this essay, Professor Raffa has built on the success of Danteworlds to show how digital scholarship advances the reciprocity of university research and teaching while making this work available for the benefit of society at large. He has been interviewed for articles in Slate and The Atlantic, and has published essays on a wide range of popular topics, from medieval battles, the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, and Google, to Mad Men, marriage equality, Dan Brown, and baseball beards.

Front Cover of Danteworlds book

Danteworlds home page

Take a multimedia journey--combining textual commentary, artistic images, and audio recordings--through the three realms of Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. The Danteworlds Web site contains, in addition to an abridged version of the original commentary in The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy and Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Inferno, Italian recordings of selected verses and a vast gallery of images depicting characters and scenes from the Divine Comedy.

The subject of an interview in Life & Letters, Danteworlds is "an invaluable resource for specialists and novices alike," writes E. S. Hierl (Harvard University) in Choice Reviews Online, "the sort of multimedia experience that those in the digital humanities strive for" (August, 2010)


July 29, 1998 (last updated on April 8, 2019) © 1998-2019 Guy P. Raffa
Department of
French and Italian, College of Liberal Arts, UT Austin
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