Giuseppe Mazzotta is the Sterling Professor of Humanities for Italian. A Sterling Professorship is the highest academic rank at Yale University, awarded to a tenured faculty member considered one of the best in his or her field.

Professor Mazzotta was born in Curinga (Catanzaro), Italy and studied in Italy, Canada, and the United States, receiving his PhD from Cornell University. He is the Director of Graduate Studies and served as president of the Dante Society of America (2003-2009). His books include:

• Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy (Princeton, 1979)
• The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Princeton, 1986)
• Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton, 1993)
• The Worlds of Petrarch (Duke UP, 1993)
• The New Map of the World: the Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton, 1998)
• Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment (Toronto UP, 2001)

Professor Mazzotta has also edited or co-edited several boooks, such as Critical Essays on Dante (Hall, 1991) and Master Regis (Fordham UP, 1985). In 2008, he published the Norton edition of Dante’s Inferno (translated by M. Palma).