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John Freccero

New York 25 july 1931 - Santa Cruz CA 22 november 2021

John Freccero, a preeminent Dante scholar and an influential Professor of literature, died on November 22, 2021. He was 90 years old. Over the many decades of his career, he held tenured positions and endowed chairs on the faculties of Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Yale, Stanford and New York University. He retired from teaching in 2015 at the age of 84. He died in Santa Cruz, California in the company of family.

John Freccero transformed North American Dante studies, bringing unprecedented theoretical sophistication into the field and making a generation of scholars beyond it aware of Dante’s immense historical and cultural significance in Europe and beyond. His contributions ranged from the most learned revisions of our understanding of Dante’s use of Plato and St. Augustine and the most trenchant reassessment of medieval modes of self-writing and theories of signification, to the great poet’s under-valued place in the History of Science. He made fundamental contributions to the study of Petrarch, Machiavelli and John Donne, among others.

Born on July 25, 1931 in New York City to Italian immigrant parents, Freccero attended Johns Hopkins University on an academic scholarship. Upon obtaining his undergraduate and master’s degree at Hopkins, Freccero served in the United States Army and was stationed in Germany. Freccero returned to Johns Hopkins after completing his military service, and in 1958 earned his PhD in Romance Languages under the tutelage of the renowned Dante scholar, Charles Singleton. Subsequently Freccero embarked on a distinguished career as a scholar and a professor. He joined the faculties of Johns Hopkins University (1959-1963), Cornell University (1963-1969), Yale University (1969-1979), Stanford University (1979-1992) and New York University (1992-2015), often serving as the head of the departments where he taught.

In addition to his work in Dante Studies, Freccero wrote widely on topics related to literary criticism, with essays on Italo Svevo and the director Michelangelo Antonioni. His articles came to be admired for their eloquence, clarity and insight. His works include the edited anthology, Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1965), the critically acclaimed Dante, The Poetics of Conversion (Harvard, 1986), and In Dante’s Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition (Fordham, 2015). His introductions were solicited for a number of notable American translations of Dante’s work, John Ciardi’s 1970 translation of Dante’s Paradiso and US poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s 1994 popular translation of the Inferno, among them.

Freccero was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, both in the United States and in Italy. He received two Fulbright fellowships for postdoctoral work, a Guggenheim fellowship, the lifetime achievement award from the Dante Society of America, and in 2015, was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in the category of Humanities and the Arts. In Italy, he was honored with the Fiorino d’Oro from the City of Florence and the Premio Presidente della Repubblica for Italian Studies. He was later awarded one of Italy’s most prestigious titles, Ufficiale al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic) for his scholarship on Italy’s most eminent poet, Dante Alighieri.

John Freccero was perhaps most well-known as an inspiring teacher. His lectures were always widely attended, and over the years he developed a loyal and passionate following among students and scholars. Many of his students went on to have distinguished academic careers of their own and are now teaching at universities throughout the world. To those who studied with him over the years, Freccero is remembered as a charismatic and captivating thinker, an eager mentor, and a lover of great literature and ideas. He will be missed by many.

John Freccero was predeceased by his wife, Diane. Among his survivors are his first wife, Yvonne, his four children, Carla, Stephen, Francesca and Paola, and his grandchildren Isabella, Daniela and Elijah.