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Dante in the Lab

Dante in the Lab

Online Webinar

Oct 18, 2021 06:00 PM (CT)

dante in the lab

Beatrice Fazio (PhD candidate, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago, Italian Studies) and Tanvi Gandhi (PhD candidate and Eckhardt Scholar in the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago) will introduce Dante in the Lab, an exploration of the influence of contemporary physics and medieval literature on each other.

Dante in the Lab is an exploration of the influence of contemporary physics and medieval literature on each other. The team consists of Beatrice Fazio (PhD candidate, RLL, Italian Studies) and Tanvi Gandhi (PhD candidate, Physics), who investigate the physical mechanisms that lay down the topology of Dante’s Inferno. The concepts of entropy and classical gravity, as well as ideas of apparent order and underlying chaos, are considered to reframe our understanding of Hell. To illustrate the changes in entropy while traveling through the various circles of Hell, the team presents a short film which uses the narrative device of a couple experiencing a breakup. The film is further accompanied by animated illustrations and visuals from a soft matter experiment of an entropic phase transition. Identifying the themes that relate the worlds of science and literature will not simply help us clarify the role of medieval physics in Dante’s Comedy, and how it connects to contemporary physics, but it will also expand new areas of synergy between fields often considered mutually exclusive.

Beatrice Fazio is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago’s department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Before joining the department in 2018, Beatrice studied at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, where she completed her BA and MA in Italian.
Beatrice is an early modernist and her research focuses on the cultural, philosophical, and political paradigms regarding the making and reassessment of Italian tradition. Specifically, she is studying the intersections between Italian humanism and Romanticism within a frame of reference ranging from Petrarch and Machiavelli to Vico and Leopardi. Her interests include medieval science and philosophy, the connection between political theory and aesthetics, and intellectual history.

Tanvi Gandhi is a PhD candidate and Eckhardt Scholar in the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago. She works in soft condensed matter, studying the properties of granular materials from an experimental point of view. Her current research focuses on the local contact interactions that arise in driven granular systems and the macroscopic impacts of these grain-scale properties. She is a 2021-22 Graduate Fellow with the UChicago Arts, Science + Culture Initiative. Tanvi holds a BS in Physics from the University of California, San Diego.

Register for the Webinar at this link.

  • Organizzato da: Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago
  • In collaborazione con: Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, U