Joan Ferrante

Joan Ferrante is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. At Columbia since 1963, Professor Ferrante has also taught at Swarthmore, Fordham, Tulane. She has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and NEH and is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. She has served on the boards of Speculum, Lectura Dantis Americana, and Dante Studies; has served on Executive Councils of the Medieval Academy and MLA, and as President of the Dante Society and the national Phi Beta Kappa Society, and as President of the Medieval Academy. Her field is medieval comparative literature, specializing in Dante, Provencal lyric, medieval allegory and romance, and women in the Middle Ages. She has published many articles and several books, including To the Glory of Her Sex: Women’s Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts (1997), The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy (1984), The Lais of Marie de France, a translation and commentary written with Robert Hanning (1978), Woman as Image in Medieval Literature (1975), Guillaume d’Orange, Four Twelfth Century Epics (1974), The Conflict of Love and Honor: The Medieval Tristan Legend (1973). She is currently working on a database on medieval women’s letters, called Epistolae, which is available online through the Columbia Interactive.