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HISTORY AND HIGHLIGHTS OF THE DEVERS PROGRAM
In 1995, William and Katherine Devers of Winnetka, Illinois, established the Devers Program in Dante Studies through a generous $1 million gift to the University of Notre Dame. William Devers is president of the Devers Group, Inc., a consortium of computer companies providing application software to the publishing, utility and other industries. He is also a member of the advisory council for Notre Dame's College of Arts and Letters. The Devers have four children, one of whom graduated from the Notre Dame Law School in 1990. The Devers have also endowed a library collection for the Kresge Law Library at Notre Dame.
The inaugural celebration for the William and Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies was held on March 20, 1996, in the Department of Special Collections. The evening's events began with a lecture by Zygmunt Baranski of the University of Reading entitled "Dante's Library." After his presentation, a short ceremony was held in the foyer of the Hesburgh Library to unveil and bless the commemorative plaque for the Devers endowment. Following the unveiling of the plaque, University president Rev. Edward Malloy, CSC, offered a dedicatory mass in the Rare Book Reading Room. Guests were subsequently invited to a reception and dinner in the library penthouse. In all, about 80 professors, administrators and friends of the library joined the Devers family for the festivities.
Baranski's lecture at the inauguration of the Devers Program was the first in a series of six he offered during the spring semester to graduate and undergraduate students as part of a one-credit course titled "Dante's Intellectual Histories" held on Wednesdays between March 20 and April 24. Baranski was invited to Notre Dame to be the first Visiting Professor of Dante studies through the Devers Program.
Also in the spring of 1996, the Devers Program and the College of Arts and Letters co-sponsored the visit of poet Robert Pinsky and graphic artist Michael Mazur to the University on March 6-8. In 1994, Pinsky published a contemporary
verse translation
of the Inferno which was illustrated with monotype prints by Mazur. An exhibition of Mazur's monotypes was on display at the Snite Museum of Art on the University campus from February 12 to March 26, 1996.
To complement the Mazur exhibition at the Snite Museum, a special book exhibit was mounted Christian Dupont in the Department of Special Collections. Titled "Ways into the City of Woes: Illustrations of Dante's Inferno," the exhibit featured more than sixty illustrated editions of the
Inferno
from the University's historic
John A. Zahm Dante collection.
Since its inauguration, the Devers Program in Dante Studies has served as a catalyst for a wide variety of programs in Italian studies, both at Notre Dame and in collaboration with other institutions.
The
Devers Travel Grant for Notre Dame graduate students was announced for the first time in the September 1, 1996, issue of the Graduate Fellowship Newsletter (replaced in 2003 by the Graduate Fellowships Database). The
Devers Research and Teaching Grant, intended to provide support for faculty engaged in research and/or teaching of Dante across the humanities was first announced in the September 1996 issue of
Communique,
a monthly newsletter distributed to College of Arts and Letters faculty by the
Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame.
An annual
Devers lecture series
was launched during the fall 1996 semester. The series has included a number of respected scholars in the field of Dante studies from the United States and Italy. Audiences of forty to fifty faculty, students and other friends of the Devers program gather regularly for these events to keep abreast of the latest scholarly research and enjoy a wine and cheese reception. Invited lecturers typically remain on campus for a day following their visit to meet with interested graduate and undergraduate students.
The
William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante Studies
made its debut in October 1995 with the publication of
Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies,
a collection of ten essays originating from a 1993 University of Notre Dame conference which focuses on three intensely cultivated areas: poetics, "minor works", and reception. The second volume of the Devers Series,
The
Fiore
in Context: Dante, France, Tuscany,
appeared in May 1997. This volume contains the proceedings of an international symposium on the
Fiore
held at St. John's College, Cambridge, in September 1994. The third volume of the series,
The Design in the Wax, was published in 1999. In this publication, author Marc Cogan analyzes the structure
of the Divine Comedy, unveiling the single consistent principle which organizes each part of the
poem and the overall narrative.
Devers Series editors Theodore Cachey and Christian Moevs are actively soliciting manuscripts to publish as future volumes in the series.
In addition to the Devers Series published by the University of Notre Dame Press, the Devers Program has entered into collaborations with other universities and research institutes to publish scholarly resources for Italian studies on the Internet. The first such collaborative project was
Renaissance Dante in Print (1472-1629),
an online version of a rare book exhibit presented by the University of Notre Dame in conjunction with The Newberry Library with the technical assistance of the ARTFL project at the University of Chicago. Mounted in September 1994, it was one of the first exhibits of its kind available on the Internet and it continues to attract many visitors from around the world. The Devers Program and ARTFL subsequently teamed together with the Centro di studi Opera del vocabolario italiano, a research center of the Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche (CNR) in Florence, Italy, and the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Reading, England, to launch
ItalNet.
In August 1997, ItalNet began alpha testing of an online version of the Opera del vocabolario italiano textual database, which will ultimately offer scholars full-text search capabilities of a corpus of more than two thousand pre-1375 vernacular texts.
In October 1996, the Devers Program in Dante Studies was invited to participate in
Progetto Italica, an initiative of Radio televisione italiana (RAI) to create a virtual campus of Italian culture on the Internet. In February 1997, the Devers Program organized a workgroup to produce a language teaching program using video material from the RAI.
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