Triennale Estate, dialogue with Dante's Manuele Gragnolati on the mystery in Dante

The first appointment with Manuele Gragnolati, Full Professor of Medieval Italian Literature at Sorbonne Université, Vice-Director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College in Oxford, will be held on Tuesday 27 July at the Triennale, and Vice-President of the Société Dantesque de France, who will talk with Ersilia Vaudo, astrophysicist, Chief Diversity Officer at the European Space Agency (ESA), curator of the 23rd International Exhibition of Triennale Milano, Unknown Unknowns. An Introduction to Mysteries, which will be inaugurated in May 2022.

The meeting

On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, the meeting will be dedicated to deepening the theme of the mystery and the unknown in the supreme poet through the intervention of Manuele Gragnolati, who will propose a “post human” reading of the Divine Comedy, projecting it into the contemporary world and paying particular attention to the theme of diversity.

Manuele Gragnolati

Manuele Gragnolati was trained at University of Pavia (Laurea), at Paris IV-Sorbonne (DEA) and at Columbia University (Ph.D.). He has taught at Dartmouth College and at the University of Oxford and since 2015 he is Full Professor of Medieval Italian Literature at Sorbonne Université. He is also Vice-Director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College in Oxford, and Vice-President of the Société Dantesque de France. His first monograph Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (2005) explores the meaning of corporeality in 13th and 14th century culture, focusing in particular on Dante's Comedy, Scholastic philosophy and didactic-spiritual literature written in vulgar. He has written a commentary on Dante's early rhymes and has dealt with linguistic subjectivity from Vita Nova to the present, with rewrites and modern appropriations of medieval texts, lyric poetry and feminist and queer theories. His second monograph, Amor che move. Language of the body and form of desire in Dante, Pasolini and Morante (2013), proposes a reading by diffraction of the meaning of body, language and desire in Dante and in two great twentieth-century authors who approached Dante from eccentric positions. His latest monograph, written together with Francesca Southerden, is Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue, with an Epilogue by Antonella Anedda (2020), which offers a reading of Petrarca's lyrics in dialogue with those of Guido Cavalcanti, Dante and Shakespeare , and ends with an essay by the poet Antonella Anedda. He has organized numerous conferences and directed numerous international projects which have given rise to various collective volumes. Recently, for the Oxford University Press, she edited the Oxford Handbook of Dante (2021, in collaboration with Elena Lombardi and Francesca Southerden).

Ersilia Vaudo

Ersilia Vaudo graduated in Astrophysics. In 2020 he obtained the Executive Certificate from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard Kennedy School. Since 1991 he has been working at the European Space Agency where he is currently ESA Chief Diversity Officer and Special Advisor on Strategic Evolution in Paris. In December 2020 she was assigned the role of Curator of the 23rd International Exhibition of Triennale Milano entitled Unknown Unknowns. An Introduction to Mysteries.

During his thirty-year career, between Paris and the USA, he held various roles, especially in the field of strategy. She was Executive Secretary of the Scientific-Technological Advisory Group of the ExoMars mission. Between 2002 and 2006 he worked at ESA's Washington DC office, taking care in particular of relations with NASA. She was a member of the Board of Directors of Women in Aerospace US. In 2020 he received the prestigious Excellence Diversity Award from the International Astronautical Federation for the space sector for ESA. In October 2020 she received the 2020 Tecnovisionarie International Award, Special Europe Award, from the Women & Technologies Association. In the same year she was part of the Women Task Force for a New Renaissance, set up by the Minister of Equal Opportunities and the Family, where she contributed in particular to the formulation of proposals relating to the topic of Research, STEM and skills training. It is part of the # 100esperte list, a project to enhance the female expertise of the Bracco Foundation for the item “Science”. Ersilia Vaudo is co-founder and President of the itinerant Il Cielo association that promote STEM literacy among children in situations of social hardship by bringing science and a telescope to areas of high educational poverty. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Women's Forum G20 Italy 2021 and of the Scale-Up Europe initiative, launched in 2020 by the French President Emmanuel Macron. He is co-chair of Scale-Up Europe's recommendations on the Future of Work to revive the Tech ecosystem in Europe. He has participated as a speaker at various TEDx Talks in Europe and has written numerous articles for the general public on science and space, convinced of the inspiring power of science on the younger generations.