2021 Fordham Reads Dante Lecture: “What’s a Dante Theme Park? Reading and Writing The Divine Comedy Into the American Present”

Writer and professor Randy Boyagoda, Ph.D., University of Toronto, has been reading a canto of The Divine Comedy every day for the past five years while writing a novel about people building a Dante theme park in an opioid-ravaged American small town. In this talk and reading from his new novel, Dante’s Indiana, he will reflect on what it means to imagine contemporary life with and through Dante’s vision of eternal sinners and saints. In turn, he will consider what the perils and promises of Inferno and Paradiso mean for our own lives in a purgatorial-feeling here and now.