Popularizing Paradiso: On the Difficulties of Podcasting Dante’s Most Academic Canticle

Abstract

The digital humanities are rapidly expanding access to scholarly and literary materials once largely confined to the university. No more: now, with free digital resources, like Giuseppe Mazzotta’s lecture series available for free through Open Yale Courses on YouTube, or Teodolinda Barolini’s 54-lecture long “The Dante Course”, also available for free through her Digital Dante website, academic discussions of difficult masterpieces are available to any person with enough bandwidth to handle it. I, too, made a brief foray into the digital humanities, and prior to turning to academic work, I provided a 42-lecture Dante-in-translation course which itself covered the entirety of Dante’s Comedy and sought to offer a less academic, and more accessible series of lectures on Dante than its more academic and more popular predecessors.