Dante Society South Africa
ANTESSA
Dr Sonia Fanucchi
Founder
Sonia Fanucchi is a scholar in the Department of English at Wits University. She has a long-standing passion for Dante and the ways in which this text has been mediated through various contexts, which she has explored in her research in Victorian Medievalism and anti-Catholicism, including her MA on Dantesque figurations in Dickens and her PhD entitled, “Realism and Ritual in the rhetoric of fiction: anti-theatricality and anti-Catholicism in Bronte, Newman and Dickens. Her interest in Dante has also inspired various pedagogical projects, including a popular course at second
year level which led to the publication of a 2013 article published in English Academy Review and entitled, “Conversations among the Living Dead: Counterpoint in Action in the English Curriculum”. Her most recent article entitled, “Re-membering history: allegory as sacrament in Inferno's Prologue scene” is due to be published in the latest edition of Religion and Literature and explores her growing interest in Dante’s language of memory and particularly how this affects our perception of his allegory, a line of thought that has inspired a further research project on Inferno, on which she is currently working.
In addition to her own research, Sonia remains dedicated to developing a South African community of young Dante scholars and enthusiasts and in nurturing the Dante Society of South Africa. To this end, she is pursuing connections between South African writers and the Commedia, particularly in the context of the fascination with Medievalism at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Dr Anita Virga
Founder
Anita Virga is Senior Lecturer in the Italian Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut in 2015. She has published various book chapters and articles on Italian cinema and literature in academic journals such as Italian Studies in Southern Africa, Spunti e ricerche, Lingue e Letterature d'Oriente e d'Occidente, Tydskrif vir letterkunde, Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, English Studies in Africa and Italica, and a monograph titled
Subalternità siciliana nella scrittura di Luigi Capuana e Giovanni Verga (Firenze UP, 2017). She was the President of Association of Professional Italianists (API in South Africa) from 2015 to 2017 and she has been the Editor of the journal Italian Studies in Southern Africa since 2018. Her research interests are postcolonialism, migration, black identity, blended learning, Dante in Africa, Sicilian literature and cinema, Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga.
Ross Smith
Member
Ross Smith received a Bachelor of the Arts Honours Degree with Distinction in 2016 in English and Italian literature from the University of the Witwatersrand. During his undergraduate years, Ross was awarded the Centro Culturale Italio-Sudafricano Prize for Italian and numerous other certificates and Merit Awards. His Honour’s research project focussed on the apocalyptic undercurrent of Dante’s Inferno, specifically highlighting the distortions of the human dimension of time and how these distortions are presented against the eternal landscape of the afterlife. This
research won the Arlene Osman Research Prize in 2016. Ross graduated with a Master of the Arts degree in literature, also from the University of the Witwatersrand, in 2020, with a dissertation entitled “Dantesque Aeviternal Apocalypses: Stasis and Motion in the Eternal timescapes of Dante’s Inferno”. He explores Dante’s apocalyptic animus and the interactions between eternity, historical time, historical personages, and myth which are housed in a quasi-eternal timescape. Ross is currently reading for his PhD which explores the relationship between Dantesque representations of apocalyptic moments in which the individual subject encounters the eternal realm whilst maintaining vision of secular history and human emotion. In addition to his PhD research, Ross is working on the Dantesque apocalyptic nuances found in the works of Ben Okri.
Thalén Rogers
Member
Thalén Rogers started at Wits in 2015 studying Astrophysics. Ultimately, he moved into the Humanities and graduated with distinction in English and Psychology in 2019. He was awarded the Faculty of Humanities Silver Proxime Accessiy medal in 2019. In 2020 he
completed Psychology honours with distinction. This year he is doing honours in English. Thalén joined Dantessa when it first started because he loves literature and has a particular interest in Medieval religious texts. He finds the way Dante's work continues to influence language, literature, and society fascinating.
Anna Helena van Urk
Member
Anna Helena van Urk is an undergraduate at the University of the Witwatersrand, majoring in History, International Relations and English Literature. She has a special interest in
medieval, Renaissance and Romantic texts and a passion for writing, both creatively and in more formal settings. She joined the Dantessa Society in 2021, having long admired Dante for his revolutionary ideals, creative technique and his broad-ranging impact on Western arts, culture and literature that continues to be felt to this day.
Lesego Maponyane
Member
Lesego Maponyane is a third year student majoring in Philosophy, Politics and English Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. The subject of Dante first
piqued her interest through a creative writing project, during which she was particularly struck by his remarkable use of imagery in Paradiso. Her primary realm of study within Dantessa surrounds his imagining of Beatrice through the lens of feminist literary criticism and gender studies.
Casey Fern
Member
Casey Fern received her Bachelor of the Arts Degree with Distinction from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2020, with majors in English Literature and History. The recipient of various Merit Awards throughout her undergraduate studies, Casey received the I. J. Kriel Prize from the Faculty of Humanities in 2020 as the highest achieving student in English Literature III. For her Honours studies, she received a generous scholarship from the MELLON Foundation through the History
Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand. As of 2021, she is a Masters Fellow researching the intersections of gender and class in the medical profession at the turn of the twentieth century, funded by a successive Masters Scholarship from the MELLON Foundation. While her expertise lies in historical research, Casey maintains an enthusiastic connection to literary studies from her undergraduate degree. Her research into Dante considers the theme of socio-spatial liminality in Purgatorio.
Kylin Lötter
Member
Kylin Lötter is a postgraduate student at the University of Witswatersrand. She began studying Fine Art but later realised that her passion lay in literature, so she switched to a general BA degree. She completed her
undergraduate degree in English Literature and Philosophy in 2020 and is currently doing her Honours in English Literature. Her first memory of Dante was when she was nine years old and picked up a random book at her mother’s friend’s house. It was the story of Dante and Beatrice that would stick with her for years until she leapt at the chance to learn more about Dante at university.
Shayna Josi
Member
Shayna Josi is a recent graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand, where she studied B.A Honours in English. Wits was where she had her first academic experience with Dante in the form of The Divine Comedy. Dante’s writings spoke to Shayna’s experience
of coming from an immigrant family in South Africa, and of living apart from her homeland, culture, and language while living in Japan, an experience which spoke of the commonality between peoples across boundaries. It’s this bond of shared struggles and the journey of betterment that sparked Shayna’s interest in Dante.
Jordan Franks
Member
Jordan Franks has completed her first degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa majoring in Law, Italian and International Relations in the Bachelor of Arts. She is
currently studying her post graduate degree in law in Italy. She cultivated an interest in the literature of Dante Alighieri. And now his work is the ‘Virgil’ in her new life as she discovers herself in Italy.