About the Directors

Let us introduce ourselves: we are Bill Stephany and Ron Herzman, two long-time students of Dante, who will be offering, in 2011, our ninth co-directed NEH summer seminar on the Commedia in Siena.  Both of us have had an unusually strong history of collaboration in our teaching and in our scholarship, both together and with others. Even before co-directing these seminars, we have taught in each other's classes, have published together (our first long Dante essay was jointly authored), have been among the most important first readers of each other's scholarship, and continue to work, both individually and in collaboration, on topics that have emerged directly from our Seminar experiences. (Our most recent Dante essay is also jointly authored.) Dante has been a central focus of our scholarly writing, and we have both had a long and fruitful involvement with pre-collegiate teachers, in the Summer Seminars for School Teachers Program and elsewhere.

Bill Stephany was a Professor of English at the University of Vermont for 35 years. He taught Dante there regularly on both the undergraduate and graduate level and continues to do so on occasion, has taught the Commedia in nine separate summer programs in Italy, and has co-directed NEH Summer Institutes for College Teachers on Dante at Dartmouth and at Stanford. He has published widely on Dante’s Commedia, including a book on Canto 2 of Inferno, and much of his ongoing scholarship concerns Dante and the visual arts. He has also taught in a University of Vermont summer program in London, and was instrumental in establishing the University’s Junior Year Abroad program at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Bill has directed fifteen previous NEH Seminars for School Teachers, thirteen of them on Dante.

Ron Herzman is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at SUNY Geneseo, where he has taught Dante almost every year since 1974. He has taught Dante to graduate and undergraduate students at Georgetown University, to Trappist Monks, and to inmates at Attica Correctional Facility. He was a visiting faculty member at the Dartmouth Dante Institute, and with his Geneseo colleague Bill Cook has “taught” a twenty-four lecture audio/videocassette course on Dante for the Teaching Company's “Great Courses” Program. The Medieval World View (written with Bill Cook) was originally prepared for students going to Italy to study Dante, and its subsequent revisions reflect insights gathered from teaching in Italy since. He has also written extensively on Dante. Ron likewise has directed fifteen previous SSST Seminars, twelve of them on Dante.

Our group will also benefit from the contributions of other teacher-scholars during the summer. Christie Fengler-Stephany, for 32 years a University of Vermont Art History professor specializing in Italian late Medieval and Renaissance Art, will help us understand the visual art from Dante's lifetime. Christie is herself a former NEH Seminar director, has taught in numerous overseas studies programs, including our previous seminars in Italy, and collaborates with Bill Stephany on their joint projects concerning Dante and art. Gary Towsley of Geneseo's Mathematics Department, recently honored by the American Mathematics Association, will lecture on the scientific and mathematical worldview that underlies the Comedy. Wes Kennison, also of Geneseo and former director of the SUNY study abroad program in Siena, will provide orientation lectures about the city, its history, and its Palio. Finally, Lynn Kennison, the Administrative Assistant for this and our previous eight Sienese seminars, will be with us in Siena. She knows the city (and the country) well, and you will find her an indispensable resource as you negotiate the vagaries of Italian culture.

If we have learned anything from our teaching and writing about Dante over the years, it is that with every new reading the poem keeps getting more exciting. For that reason, we are delighted by the prospect of collaborating with each other and with new teacher-participants, under what we expect to be extremely rich circumstances. Like many other directors in the program, we consider these seminars to be among our greatest teaching and learning experiences.