Dr Daragh O'Connell - Director

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He is the Head of the Department of Italian, UCC. Daragh was also formerly the Head of Research in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and Director of CASiLaC (Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures), he researches across three distinct areas: Dante Studies, Vico and Eighteenth-century Neapolitan Culture, and Modern and Contemporary Sicilian Literary Culture.
He is currently working on a project tentatively titled: Courting Dante: Love and Politics in the ‘Divine Comedy’ which seeks to revisit Dante’s radical conception of the medieval court, both as a locus for articulations of love and as a site for political positioning.
He has co-edited three volumes on Dante: Nature and Nature in Dante: Literary and Theological Essays, with Jennifer Petrie (Dublin: Four Courts, 2013); War and Peace in Dante: Essays Literary, Historical and Theological (Dublin: Four Courts, 2015) and Dante and the Seven Deadly Sins, both with John C. Barnes (Dublin: Four Courts, 2017).

Other Dante-related publications include:

  1. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘Kicking with the Other Foot: Dante in Ireland, Between Sectarianism and Nationalism’, Bibliotheca Dantesca, 6 (2024), pp. 289-310. DOI: Bibliotheca Dantesca, Vol. 6 | Manifold Scholarship (manifoldapp.org)
  2. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘Vita Nova VIII [3]’, in Dante’s “Vita Nova”: A Collaborative Reading, edited by Zygmunt G. Barański & Heather Webb (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023), pp. 75-82.  
  3. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘An Irish Dante, Part II: A Dantean Afterlife’, in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 444 (Winter 2022), pp. 401-411.
  4. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘Between concatenatio pulcra and the “Tyranny of Rhyme”: Translating Dante’s libello’, in J. Blakesley and F. Coluzzi (eds.) Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Translation and Reception History: The Afterlife of Dante’s Vita Nova in the Anglophone World (London: Routledge, 2022), pp. 175-188.
  5. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘”a poetar mi davano intelletto”: Virgil, Dante, Heaney’, in Liber amicorum: Medieval Studies, Translation, Creativity, edited by Corinna Salvadori & John Scattergood (Turin: Trauben, 2022), pp. 79-138. 
  6. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘La consolazione di Dante: Echi danteschi ne Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio’, Mosaico italiano XIII: 211 (2022), pp. 7-18.
  7. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘An Irish Dante, Part I: Possible Precursors to the Commedia’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 111: 442 (Summer, 2022), pp. 125-133.
  8. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘Dante’s “convento de le bianche stole”: Two Points Between Nudity and Folly’, in Nudity and Folly in Early Modern Italian Literature from Dante to Leopardi, edited by Simon Gilson and Ambra Moroncini (Florence: Cesati, 2022), pp. 29-52.
  9. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘“Diverse voci fanno dolci note”: Dante Between Scholarship and Commemoration’, in Annali d’Italianistica, 39 (2021), pp. 412-426.
  10. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘Il canto della gola: Inferno VI, Ciacco fra Boccaccio e Benigni’, in Così «intrai per lo cammino alto e silvestro»: Attraversare l’Inferno dantesco con Roberto Benigni, edited by Franco Musarra, Pacifico Ramazzotti, Andrea Aldo Robiglio, Bart Van Den Bossche (Florence: Cesati, 2021), pp. 49-67.
  11. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘Visible Speech: A Comedy Across Time’, in 100 Lithographs – Dante’s Divine Comedy – Liam Ó Broin, edited by Liam Ó Broin and Brain McAvera (Dublin: OPW Publishing, 2021), pp. 13-20
  12. O’Connell, Daragh (with Beatrice Sica), ‘Literary Cultures in/and Italian Studies’, Italian Studies. Special Issue: Key Directions in Italian Studies 75:2 (2020), 125-139.
  13. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘“Corti vizio”: Dante e l’idea cortese’, in Percorsi del testo: la letteratura italiana tra adattamento e appropriazione, edited by Sergio Portelli and KarlChircop (Florence: Cesati, 2020), pp. 31-40.
  14. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘Canto XVIII: ovvero, quando le parole cominciano a puzzare’, Letture dell’Inferno di Roberto Benigni, edited by Franco Musarra et al (Florence: Cesati, 2020), pp. 121-134.
  15. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘Resisting the Court: Courtesy and Courtliness in the Commedia’, in Resistance in Italian Culture from Dante to the 21st century, edited by Ambra Moroncini, Darrow Schecter and Fabio Vighi (Florence: Cesati, 2019), pp. 33-48.
  16. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘“Whorish Eyes”: Envy at the Court of Vice’, in Barnes, John C. & O’Connell, Daragh, Dante and the Seven Deadly Sins: Literary and Theological Essays (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017), pp. 91-123.
  17. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘Denti Alligator: The Dantification of Popular Culture’, in Kelly, Michael G. & O’Connell, Daragh, Comparative Becomings: Studies in Transition (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016), 19-46.
  18. O’Connell, Daragh, ‘Dante’s Silent Ship: Similes, Swimming and Seafaring in the Commedia’, in O’Connell, D. & Petrie, J. (eds.), Nature and Nature in Dante: Literary and Theological Essays, with Jennifer Petrie (Dublin: Four Courts, 2013), pp. 121-151.

Research Projects:
Daragh was/is PI on the following Dante-related projects:

1) Dr David Bowe - Writing women's voices at the origins of Italian literary culture
(2 years – 2018-2020)

2) Dr Federica Coluzzi - Beyond Literary Influence: Reconfiguring Dante's Critical and Scholarly Reception in the British Isles (1810s-1910s)
(1 Year – 2019-2020)

3) Dr Valentina Mele - Lyric Subjectivity in Guido Cavalcanti’s Rime
(1 Year – 2020-2021)

4) Dr Leyla Livraghi - Livy's legacy in Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio: the practice of reading history in Italian culture from the late 13th to the 14th century
(2 Years – 2020-2022)