The 2023 Fordham Reads Dante Lecture: Dante Behind Bars: “Not Made to Live Like Brutes” 9/19/2023

Tuesday, September 19 | 5:30 p.m.
Butler Commons | Duane Library | Third Floor
Rose Hill Campus
Drawing on his experience facilitating Dante workshops in prisons in Italy, Indonesia, and the U.S., Jenkins will discuss ways in which the Divine Comedy is viewed by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated readers who find compelling similarities between Dante’s journey out of hell and their own journeys out of prison.
Ron Jenkins is a recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships. He has facilitated theater workshops inspired by Dante’s poetry in prisons, with support from the R.F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights, the Asian Cultural
Council, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Jenkins has written books on theater and social justice, and his articles, including “Transformation Behind Bars,” have been published by The New York Times, The Jakarta Post, and The Yale ISM Review. He has translated and directed plays by the Nobel laureate Dario Fo for productions at the Yale
Repertory Theatre, American Repertory Theater at Harvard University, and the New York Theatre Workshop. His documentary plays have been
commissioned by the Mellon Foundation, the U.S. State Department, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. A professor of theater at Wesleyan University, Jenkins continued his Dante prison projects as a 2022-2023 Fellow
at the Yale Divinity School’s Institute of Sacred Music, where he has been teaching courses on Dante since 2015. Jenkins is an honorary fellow of
the Dante Society of America.