The 16 Willamette University undergraduates in Wendy Petersen-Boring's humanities senior seminar on Dante's “Divine Comedy” went way beyond reading and discussing the text.
They examined a modern interpretation that portrays Dante as a California surfer heading through “Hell” on the streets of Los Angeles. They talked with Sandow Birk, the artist who created the modern version, and viewed his prints a block away in Willamette's Hallie Ford Museum of Art. And they met in small groups with Birk and a respected Dante scholar from Yale Divinity School to get advice on their senior thesis projects.
The experiences helped them discover how an epic Italian poem from the 14th century could still apply to their lives today — while giving them the rare chance to query renowned experts.
“Interacting with a professor who is one of the leading minds on Dante, and an artist from Los Angeles who is known internationally for his work, turned my project into something more meaningful than just writing a paper,” English major Brent Jones ’11 says. “It gave me a greater appreciation for Dante’s work and made it much more personal.”
Willamette offers the humanities senior seminar several times a year for students majoring in humanities-related fields. A different professor teaches each seminar, focusing on a single work of literature.
The seminar goes to the next level when an outside scholar visits campus to meet with the students and help them develop their theses. For the Dante class this fall, the scholar was Yale Professor Peter Hawkins, who has studied Dante since the 1970s and knows the “Divine Comedy” inside and out.
The class also benefited from a special partnership: the university’s Hallie Ford Museum of Art agreed to host an exhibition of prints from Sandow Birk’s version of “Inferno,” the first and most famous of the three parts of the “Divine Comedy.”
“I was able to think about the ‘Inferno’ in new ways by seeing those prints on the wall and setting down the text to work my way through the story with just the pictures,” says Becca Morgan ’11, a history and American ethnic studies major.
The students met in small groups with Hawkins and Birk to discuss their thesis topics.
Anna Zimmerman ’12, a religious studies and classical studies major, was considering two topics: eroticism in Dante’s work, and the ways Dante’s writings have been translated into music.
“It was helpful to hear from Birk and Hawkins about the places in the ‘Divine Comedy’ that we could use to our advantage in our projects,” she says. “They gave me a better insight into my topics and showed me how to add to the ideas I already had to make them better.”
