Sandro-Angelo De Thomasis

Sandro-Angelo de Thomasis, who was born and raised in Montreal, specializes in Dante studies, contemporary Italian poetry, and translation. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Dante and medieval semiotics: an investigation of the hermeneutic method known as “vertical reading” that sheds light on the modalities of texts and images in the Middle Ages. He is on the editorial board of the second volume of Those Who From Afar Look Like Flies (University of Toronto Press), a bilingual anthology of contemporary Italian poetry that contains several of his translations and critical essays on Andrea Inglese, Lorenzo Durante, Antonio Riccardi, Riccardo Held, and Daniele Poletti. In addition, de Thomasis has published a paper on Lorenzo Durante’s Quarantore, a rewriting of Mallarmé’s “Tombeau pour Anatole,” in Deconstructing the Model in 20th and 21st-Century Italian Experimental Writings (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019).  

Other publications of his can be found in the Journal of Italian Translation and Italica. He is translating selected works of the liberal antifascist intellectual Piero Gobetti for Agincourt Press. He is particularly interested in the relation between form and content in French and Italian literature, from Dante’s Commedia to Perec’s experimentalism and Durante’s neo-metricism. At Juilliard, de Thomasis, who joined the faculty in 2021, teaches French and Italian language classes. His foreign-language pedagogy reflects a translingual and post-communicative approach that also emphasizes metacognitive skills and transcultural competency. He has a BA in Western society and culture from Concordia University’s Liberal Arts College (Montreal) and an MA, MPhil, and PhD in Italian Studies from Yale University.