This past spring Catherine Adoyo (B.A. music and Italian, ’98) was featured in the PBS documentary DANTE: Inferno to Paradise. ​The film contained interviews with the world’s foremost scholars on Dante including Adoyo. 

DANTE: Inferno to Paradise explores the stunning power and drama of Dante Alighieri’s great masterwork, The Divine Comedy – arguably one of the greatest artistic masterpieces in the history of literature.  The documentary, directed by Ric Burns and written by Ric Burns and Riccardo Bruscagli, dives into the riveting life and times of the Florentine poet, exploring how the politics and culture of Italy and Europe in the late Middle Ages shaped the poet’s work and illuminating Dante’s seminal contribution to the birth of the Italian language and the inception of humanism itself.

Adoyo — a scholar who has held academic appointments at George Washington University, Georgetown, Westminster Choir College, Harvard, and the University of Richmond — earned a Ph.D. in romance languages and literature in 2012 from Harvard University with a dissertation analyzing the compositional architecture of the Divine Comedy titled “The Order of All Things: Mimetic Craft in Dante’s Commedia.” In 2020, Adoyo published Rain: A Song for All and None on her own imprint, Zamani Chronicles. Rain is the first of seven volumes in the author’s Dream Walker Canticles series, a work of literary fiction that draws inspiration from Dante’s poetics to reclaim the storytelling voices of oral tradition in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa. Adoyo is currently developing the second volume in the series, Wind.