Dante

While Dante's Divine Comedy is exceedingly learned, it's also deeply engaged with the issues and people of its own day—salacious gossip and mudslinging, to be honest. To bring Dante's Inferno up to date, our students nominated new people for Hell—well-known historical or literary figures, and celebrities or people recognizable from current events—and placed them in the ring of Hell they thought most appropriate to their sins.

Dante is famous for a technique called contrapasso in which the punishment suffered by souls in Hell fits their sins (aka "the punishment fits the crime", h/t Gilbert & Sullivan). Here students analyzed instances of contrapasso in historical context: who were these people? what were their sins? how are they being punished? and—most importantly—since Dante clearly intends his Comedy as a moral lesson to his contemporaries in 14th-century Italy, what is he trying to teach his readers?