Professor Corrado Confalonieri’s 2025 began in Germany, where on January 14 he was invited to give a lecture on the concept of time in Renaissance epic poetry at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. The following day, he presented his book Torquato Tasso e il desiderio di unità (2022) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Upon returning to California directly from Germany, Dr. Confalonieri prepared and taught two courses during the Spring 2025 semester: an intermediate Italian language course and an advanced course, also in Italian, on the history and forms of theater. Both courses concluded with student projects in which participants created short films, allowing them to explore creative writing and acting, as well as to apply their understanding of regional nuances in Italian, including words and accents in local dialects studied throughout the semester.
Even after his trip to Germany, Professor Confalonieri’s semester remained full of commitments for conferences and presentations, both at Chapman and at other institutions. At Chapman, he collaborated in organizing and participated in several events sponsored by the Ferrucci Institute, including Stephanie Malia Hom’s lecture for the “Windows to Italy” series. On the same day, Professor Hom also visited Professor Confalonieri’s Italian theater course for a discussion of her work on Italia in Miniatura, a theme park in Rimini that explores miniature representations of Italy. Other events included the screening of Fred Kuwornu’s documentary We Were Here: The Untold Story of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, and the “Italian Perspective” event, which this year focused on the theme “Space and Culture.”
In March, Professor Confalonieri participated in the RSA annual meeting in Boston, presenting a paper on the theme of ruins in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. His presentation was part of one of four panels and a roundtable that he co-organized with colleagues from other universities. The sessions were well attended and featured around twenty presentations exploring various aspects of Tasso’s work and its reception.
In April, Professor Confalonieri introduced the writer Andrea Bajani at Chapman University as part of the 2025 Reading Series organized by the John Fowler Center for Creative Writing, directed by Mark Axelrod. On this occasion, he focused primarily on Bajani’s latest novel, L’anniversario (2025), which has not yet been translated into English but was recently shortlisted for the Premio Strega 2025, Italy’s most prestigious literary award. The novel has already won the Premio Strega Giovani, awarded by a jury of readers aged 16 to 18.
Also in April, Confalonieri presented a paper on the reception of Ariosto’s and Tasso’s poems in popular music at the annual conference of the American Association of Teachers of Italian (AATI) at Princeton University. The following day, before returning to the West Coast, he was invited to participate in a workshop on Tasso at Duke University in North Carolina, alongside colleagues from Duke, Wake Forest, NYU, Yale, and Bryn Mawr.
After the end of classes in late May, Professor Confalonieri made one final trip dedicated to Tasso—this time to Sorrento, Italy (Tasso’s birthplace), where he presented a paper on the late 18th-century visual translation of Gerusalemme Liberata at the conference “The Wonder of Italy: Torquato Tasso’s Legacy in International Culture”, organized by Georgetown University and the Sant’Anna Institute.
In addition to working on various essays and reviews scheduled for publication in the summer and fall, Professor Confalonieri also joined the organizing committee for the upcoming series “Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on Environment and Building Resilient Futures,” hosted by the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. As part of this program, he will teach a first-year seminar in the fall titled To Call You ‘Nature’: Italian Literary Ecologies, and in October he will host Martin Puchner (Harvard University), author of Literature for a Changing Planet (Princeton University Press, 2022), for a conversation open to the public. Also in the fall, in addition to teaching another Intermediate Italian course, he will help organize the annual meeting of the Renaissance Conference of Southern California (RCSC), which will be held at Chapman on November 1 and will conclude with a film screening sponsored by the Ferrucci Institute for Italian Experience and Research.
