This seminar explores how pre-modern debates over body and soulshaped political and eschatological thought in the Mediterranean. Each panel brings Jewish, Christian, and Islamic voices into dialogue, with Dante Alighieri’s oeuvre as a recurring point of comparison. Our aim is to situate questions of embodiment, psychology, soteriology, and collective destiny in light of their historical contexts and their wider intellectual and political implications.

Panels are organized around four thematic currents — Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, Mysticism, and Political Eschatology — in order to examine how body-soul anthropology, political theology, and visions of history intersected in the pre-modern Mediterranean (12th–16th centuries).

Full event schedule here. The day’s program will feature:

Akash Kumar (University of California, Berkeley)

Alexander Green (University of Florida, The Hamilton School for Classic and Civic Education)
Talk title: “Maimonides on the Duality of Love”

Alison Cornish (New York University)

Andrew LaZella (The University of Scranton)
Talk title: “Averroes and the Aristotelian Left: The Latin Averroists’ Agent Intellect and Dante’s Empire”

Bettina Koch (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
Talk title: “The Challenged Souls: How the Abuse of Spiritual Power Threatens the Souls in Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis”

Carla Freccero (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Elliot Wolfson (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Talk title: “Transposition of the Material into the Angelic Body: Abraham Abulafia’s Polemic with the Christian Dogma of Incarnation”

Ethan H. Shagan (University of California, Berkeley)
Talk title: “The Protestant Emergence of ‘Secular’ Political Theology”

Filippo Gianferrari (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Heather Webb (Yale University)
Talk title: “The Forms of Affective Communities: Clare of Assisi, Dante, and Catherine of Siena”

Jason Aleksander (San José State University)
Talk title: “The Enigma of History in Nicholas of Cusa’s De ultimis diebus”

Massimiliano Tomba (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Nathanael Deutsh (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Paola Nasti (Northwestern University)
Talk title: “Temporal Anticipation of the Divine: Political Eschatology and the Realization of Humanity’s Likeness to God in Dante’s Monarchia”

Paula Pico Estrada (Universidad Nacional de San Martín)
Talk title: “Annihilation and Embodiment: St. Catherine of Genoa’s Doctrine of Purgatory as Political Eschatology”

Peerawat Chiaranunt (The University of Notre Dame)
Talk title: “Dante and the De substantia orbis”

Seyed N. Mousavian (Loyola University, Chicago)
Talk title: “Avicenna on Disembodied Imagination”

Theodore Cachey (The University of Notre Dame)
Talk title: “Exile and the Alcun Vero: Dante’s Paradiso between Platonic Myth and Poetic History”

This event is sponsored by Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment, Porter College, The Humanities Institute, the Italian Studies and the Literature Department, The Center for Jewish Studies, University of California Regents System Collaboration Funding, and San José State University Division of Research and Innovation.