We are pleased to share that one of our recently published Comitatus articles, “Unfolding Dante’s Map” by Hugo Fortin (ELTS), was awarded the 2025 Charles Hall Grandgent Award by the Dante Society of America.
Read the full story published by UCLA ELTS below.
ELTS PhD student, Hugo Fortin, received the 2025 Grandgent Award, an annual award given by the Dante Society of America to the best essay on a subject related to the life or works of Dante Alighieri.
His essay, “Unfolding Dante’s Cartography: Measuring Space and Morality in the Commedia,” explores how Dante’s Divine Comedy functions as an experiment in ethical cartography, examining the overlapping moral and geographic scales of his poem through the lens of geocriticism and medieval spatial practices. It has also just been published in the UCLA journal Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Volume 56 (October 2025), an annual publication under the auspices of the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies at UCLA.
The article argues that in Dante’s Commedia, space is not merely a backdrop but a constitutive medium of meaning. Drawing on geocriticism and medieval spatial theory, the study shows how Dante constructs a moral and epistemological geography where navigating space becomes a mode of inquiry. The article also examines how Dante acts as both navigator and cartographer, engaging medieval cartographic traditions to unfold his world, collapsing physical and temporal distances into moral scales, and ultimately refolding reality to reflect divine order.
This paper originated in Prof. Roberta Morosini’s fall 2024 ELTS seminar at UCLA, “A Sea of Paper: Reading Maps, People and Spaces of the Mediterranean from Dante to Renaissance Island Books”.
“It was thanks to Prof. Morosini that I was given the opportunity to read and work through Dante, geocriticism and the history of maps,” says Hugo, “her insights and encouragement were instrumental in shaping the paper’s questions and direction.”