Celeste Connell ’26 Wins 2024 Dante Prize

Bard student Celeste Connell ’26 has won the 2024 Dante Prize, a longstanding award bestowed by the Dante Society of America for the best essay on the Italian poet Dante Alighieri by an undergraduate in the US or Canada. Connell, a junior in classical studies and literature at Bard, was awarded the prize for her essay “Lucan’s Exiles: Solitude and Moral Vision in the Commedia.” “Celeste’s prize-winning essay was unusually brilliant for a student at her early stage of development as a scholar,” said Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard. “She established quite convincingly that the political rhetoric of Lucan’s Pharsalia, a pro-republic epic poem written around the time of Virgil’s more imperial Aeneid, influenced Dante in constructing his moral vision in the Commedia. It’s always challenging to establish direct links of influence, especially between works separated from one another by more than a millennium; and yet Celeste did just that, employing her perceptive skills in close reading along with her thorough knowledge of the Latin source. The resulting essay was one that any scholar would be proud of.”

Post Date: 01-21-2025